Sea of Poppies: Book One of the Ibis Trilogy
About this audiobook
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008
'A tremendous novel'
-Literary Review
'Profoundly moving'
- The Times
'Utterly involving and piles on tension until the very last page'
-Sunday Times
At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.
In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together 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. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations.
The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive - a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists.
Discover more
About the author
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta, and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; he studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction including The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, the Ibis Trilogy (comprising the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse, Jungle Nama and The Living Mountain.Amitav Ghosh's work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He has been awarded and felicitated across the world. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the past decade. The same year, the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour, was conferred on him: he was the first English-language writer to receive it. In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize for his writings on the planetary crisis and climate change.