Chinese whispers
River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. Redruth, the vessel of a Cornish plant-hunter, Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose, sails in to Port Louis, Mauritius, two days after the Ibis, while the Anahita, belonging to Bahram Modi, a Bombay opium merchant, encounters the same storm on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Counting the cost of their voyages, characters from all three ships make their way