The great bobachee-connah

Flood of Fire. By Amitav Ghosh. John Murray; 616 pages; £20. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August.

THIS is the last volume in a rich and sweeping trilogy set across the vastness of maritime Asia. The historical backdrop is England’s looming first opium war with China (1839-42). But the magic of these novels—along with much of the narrative propulsion—comes from the way Amitav Ghosh weaves together and then apart and then together again the fates of those aboard a former slave ship, the Ibis,carrying convicts and indentured workers from Calcutta bound for Mauritius.

The first volume, “Sea of Poppies”, launched the Ibis out into a great ocean of words—away from the hot, dusty north Indian plain and the godowns and opium factories on the silt-laden Hooghly river to the sapphire waters of the Bay of Bengal. There is nothing like a ship for overturning the established order—unless it is a good storm, and in “River of Smoke” (2011), the sequel, a powerful one combines and scatters the characters in bewitching ways. In a brilliant feat of...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1cY1uWB