River of Smoke (Ghosh) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
River of Smoke does not disappoint...[it] reclaims a story appropriated for too long by its winners...yet Ghosh does so without excessive earnestness, leavening his narrative with nuggets of fact and insight...[his] historical judgments are largely rendered subtly, without any of the sledgehammer effect of retrospective moralism that a lesser writer might have employed…With River of Smoke, Ghosh's Ibis trilogy is emerging as a monumental tribute to the pain and glory of an earlier era of globalization.
Shashi Tharoor - Washington Post


On one level, [River of Smoke] is a remarkable feat of research, bringing alive the hybrid customs of food and dress and the competing philosophies of the period with intimate precision; on another it is a subversive act of empathy, viewing a whole panorama of world history from the 'wrong' end of the telescope. The real trick, though, is that it is also fabulously entertaining.
Observer (UK)


Eloquent.... Fascinating.... [River of Smoke's] strength lies in how thoroughly Ghosh fills out his research with his novelistic fantasy, seduced by each new situation that presents itself and each new character, so that at their best the scenes read with a sensual freshness as if they were happening now.
Guardian (UK)


[This] vast book has a Dickensian sweep of characters, high- and low-life intermingling . . . Ghosh conjures up a thrilling sense of place.
Economist (UK)


Brillian.... By the book’s stormy and precarious ending, most readers will clutch it like the ship’s rail awaiting, just like Ghosh’s characters, the rest of the voyage to a destination unknown.
Don Oldenburg - USA Today


Ghosh’s best and most ambitious work ye.... [He] writes with impeccable control, and with a vivid and sometimes surprising imagination.
New Yorker


Ghosh sets the second volume of his Ibis trilogy in 1838, appropriately enough, because at heart he's a 19th-century novelist with a sweeping vision of character and culture.... Ghosh triumphs both through the clarity of his style and the sweep of his vision, and he leaves the reader eager for volume three.
Kirkus Reviews