The Sea of Poppies
By Amitav Ghosh
John Murray £18.99, 480 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.19

Amitav Ghosh is a living embodiment of what has become one of his principal themes: the journeyings and displacements of the Indian diaspora. Born in Calcutta, he has studied in Delhi, Oxford and Cairo, taught in Harvard, and currently has three writing desks: one each in Bengal, Goa and Brooklyn. Along with VS Naipaul and Jhumpa Lahiri, he is one of the three pre-eminent Indian writers who have taken exile, identity and migration as their subjects. Certainly these are themes that surface over and again in Ghosh’s ambitious body of work from the mid-1990s onwards.