Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

This wonderful novel, set in the time of the Opium Wars, was on last year's Booker shortlist. It brings together the rich and the poor, the wealthy and the destitute, the indigenous and the colonial. Its multi-stranded narrative encompasses a woman fleeing her opium-addicted husband and his maleficent brother, a Raja who empire is crumbling and a callow Westerner escaping to a life on the sea, all written in lush and sensuous prose.