Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, published in 2008, takes place in the years leading up to the First Opium War, in Calcutta and in the poppy country along the Ganges. It opens with Deeti, a woman from that countryside whose husband, Hukam Singh, is a disabled labourer in the Ghazipur opium factory. Around her story the novel gathers a widely assorted cast: Neel Rattan Halder, a raja and landowner in difficulty; Zachary Reid, an American sailor of mixed parentage; and Benjamin Burnham, an opium trader with a missionary's manner. Their circumstances and misfortunes bring each of them, in the second half of the book, aboard the schooner Ibis, bound from Calcutta to Mauritius.

The ship carries a hold full of opium, a mixed crew and a cargo of convicts, stowaways and indentured passengers, and the novel moves between the poppy fields of the Ganges, the high seas of the Indian Ocean and the back streets of China. As the voyage goes on, the distinctions the passengers brought with them from land begin to lose their force, and the men and women aboard start to understand themselves as the ship's company.

The novel reached the 2008 Man Booker Prize shortlist, and it begins the Ibis trilogy, which continues in River of Smoke.