Wits University, Love Books and Jonathan Ball Publishers invite you to the launch of Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh.

In Smoke and Ashes, the Booker-shortlisted author of the Ibis trilogy explores the impact of opium on global history, economies, cultures and his own understanding of self.

Ghosh will be in conversation with Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor Emeritus, Wits University.

Ghosh is the author of the bestselling Ibis trilogy, composed of Sea of Poppies (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He is the author of many works of nonfiction, including The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. He has received two lifetime achievement awards and five honorary doctorates. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to win the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Event details

Date: Thursday 12 September 2024
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Venue: Love Books, The Bamboo Lifestyle Centre, 53 Rustenburg Road, Melville, Joburg
RSVP: kate@lovebooks.co.za or 011 726 7408
Facebook event

About the book

‘An acerbic, compelling and always accessible account of how opium corrupted the world’ – TLS

‘The writing is sublime, the research thorough, the eye for story superb’ – Sunday Telegraph

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th-century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.

Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League) and of contemporary globalism itself.

Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Categories International Non-fiction

Tags Amitav Ghosh Book events Book launches Isabel Hofmeyr Johannesburg Jonathan Ball Publishers Love Books Smoke and Ashes Wits University