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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

At the end of Amitav Ghosh’s SEA OF POPPIES (2008), a character reflects on how her life has been governed not by the sign of Saturn but by the poppy seed Offering a seed to her lover, she says: ‘Here, taste it It is the star that took us from our homes and put us on this ship It is the planet that rules our destiny’ SEA OF POPPIES is part of the Ibis trilogy by Ghosh – followed by RIVER OF SMOKE (2011) and FLOOD OF FIRE (2015) – about the nineteenth-century Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars The maritime novels use opium as a vector for unlikely alliances among a disparate cast of characters: Deeti, a widowed poppy farmer; Ah Fatt, a half-Chinese, half-Parsi convict and opium addict; Neel Rattan Halder, a bankrupt Indian landowner; Zachary Reid, a white-passing opium trader; and a multitude of other lascars and indentured servants in the Indian Ocean Each novel dramatises opium’s vast powers: to stupefy the senses, domesticate people into docility, engender hallucinations and create loopholes in linear time Personal boundaries become porous as opium encourages characters to flout caste delineations, binding them in improbable intimacies; bringing them face to face with the uncanny power of the nonhuman, or what the Enlightenment notion of history has grouped together under the umbrella of ‘nature’ With each book, Ghosh builds up a world teeming with energy – a world where opium is not mute but mutable    ‘This minuscule orb – at once bountiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful’ This is how Deeti, in SEA OF POPPIES, comes to think of the capricious poppy seed, which has dealt her both good and bad fortune Her description serves just as well for the nutmeg, another commodity that has been prized as a fillip for foodies and, on the other side of the ledger, precipitated bloody conflicts in places like the Banda Islands, located on the southeastern tip of present-day Indonesia It is the nutmeg that lends its name to Ghosh’s new work of nonfiction and serves as its central protagonist   THE NUTMEG’S CURSE is, in