As you may have heard, Salman Rushdie’s fantasy novel, The Enchantress of Florence, did not make the short list for this year’s Booker Prize. Apparently the judges didn’t think it was very good. Thankfully they refrained from making any comments about “fantasy rubbish”. But there is another book on the short list that is of interest because it is written a past winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award. Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea Of Poppies is described as follows:

Beginning in 1838, among the poppy fields of India during the build up to the first opium war, this is a historical novel of the old school. There are pirates, exotic landscapes, palaces, prisons, swash and buckle galore, while reams of information about nineteenth-century conditions give a patina of authenticity to an otherwise enjoyably unlikely narrative.

That sounds sort of Neal Stephenson-ish. The description came from Sam Jordison’s review in today’s Guardian Book Blog. Sadly for Ghosh, that’s about as good as it got. Sam was distinctly underwhelmed. Read the whole review to see why.