Sea of Poppies

Last month I wrote about the books I have been reading recently. I forgot to mention one though. The Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.

It is an epic tale and the first part of what is going to be a trilogy, called The Ibis trilogy, named after the ship Ibis which has set sail across the Indian Ocean. On board the Ibis are a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman, who soon come to discover that their destinies are strangely tied together.

To read Sea of Poppies was a real treat and as it came to an end, I wished it din’t! It is colonial India brought alive with all its richness and variety. I am eagerly waiting for the next two parts.

The Ibis Trilogy has its own website with all the informations and trivia the reader could ask for. From the reading guide on the site I found this list of further reading -

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Out of these I have read the first two. Plan to read Midnight’s Children some of these days.