River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

September 1838. A storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and three ships - the Ibis, the Anahita and the Redruth - and those aboard are caught in the whirlwind. River of Smoke follows the fortunes of these men and women to the crowded harbours of China where they struggle to cope with their losses and, for a few, unimaginable freedoms - in the alleys and teeming waterways of nineteenth-century Canton. Written on the grand scale of a historical epic, River of Smoke, book two in the Ibis trilogy, will be heralded as a masterpiece of twenty-first-century literature.