The Glass Palace in Reading with Style

Jan 14, 2012 Elizabeth (Alaska) rated it liked it

Shelves: kindle, late-20th-century

I have such mixed feelings with this one. Parts of it is beautifully written, parts of it is a slog (for me). It is a sweeping history of Burma (even though much of it takes place in India and Malaya) from the time of the British conquest in 1885 to nearly the time of publication. Most of the book takes place in the first half of the 20th Century. It is the story of two people caught up in that conquest of 1885 and their extended families.

While I was reading, I wanted more story and less histor ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Aug 03, 2021 Kathleen (itpdx) rated it really liked it

Another excellent novel by Amitav Ghosh. In the first of his novels that I read, Sea Of Poppies: Book One Of The Ibis Trilogy, history is a setting that a story with an interesting caste of characters play out their story. In The Hungry Tide, the physical setting is a character in the story. This book is a more traditional historical fiction in which the history of India, Burma and Malay is told through three families. From an Indian orphan arriving in Mandalay at the time of the British taking ...more

Like · see review

Jul 09, 2014 Joanna rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: passport, audiobooks, historical-fiction, 2014-read, rws-2014-fall

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It traces three families in Burma, India and Malaya from 1885 to a brief stint in the mid-1990s. I have little knowledge of these countries' histories and found it fascinating to read about the British Empire from this perspective. I don't know that I'd ever read about Japanese invasion during WWII from this perspective.

The author for the audiobook did a fine job keeping up with the story, but did not do enough for this listener to differentiate the different char ...more

Like · see review