Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year:
Language: English
Pages: 552
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8172234198
Description
Now in paperback edition, the highly praised author of 'The Calcutta Chromosome' and 'The Shadow Lines' has conceived a shimmering and monumental epic. This magnificent, poignant, fascinating novel of three generations starts in Mandalay.
Rajkumar is only a boy, helping out on a market stall in dusty square outside the royal palace in Mandalay, when the British force the Burmese Kind, Queen and court into exile. Thus begins The Glass Palace, a novel that only grasps the reach and fall of empires across the twentieth century, but also maps with unerring skill the rival geography of the human heart.
In the upheaval that follows the British arrival in Mandalay and the shattering of the kingdom of the Glass Palace, Rajkumar, a stateless orphan in a tattered lunghi, is lifted on the tides of chaos deep into the teak forests of upper Burma. There, with the help of an itinerant merchant he will make his fortune. Yet he is haunted by the vision of Dolly, a child attendant of the royal entourage being escorted under armed guard into exile in India. So, now adult and wealthy, he leaves Burma to find her.