The Opium Clerk

Author: Kunal BasuPublisher: PenguinYear: 2001Language: EnglishPages: 314ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143027646 DescriptionA dazzling, inventive debut by a brilliant new talent, this novel is a great adventure and a fascinating saga that sweeps across Asia, part colonial epic, part enthralling history. Hiran is born in 1857, the year of the Mutiny and the year his father dies. Brought to Calcutta by his widowed mother, he turns out to have few talents, apart from an uncanny ability to read a man's lines in his palm. When luck gets him a job at the auction house, Hiran finds himself embroiled in a mysterious trade, and even more deeply embroiled in the affairs of his nefarious superior, the infamous Mr. Jonathan Crabbe. Commissioned to procure a child for Mr. Crabbe's opium-addicted wife, somewhere in the slums of Calcutta, Hiran, the simple opium clerk, stumbles upon his own future. He of all men, who can read the lines of fate in a hand, should have been able to foretell how the disc