The Ibis Trilogy

The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh, opens with Sea of Poppies, which I thought was just wonderful - great characterizations (despite the fact there were several "main" characters, all were developed fully, AND maintained evenly throughout the book) and lovely, evocative descriptions of the settings (mainly India, at least for this book). I really couldn't recommend this book enough to anyone else, although I am a little concerned that it could be terribly inaccurate and I just don't know enough about that time period to know. It was interesting reading it shortly after Fish, Blood, and Bone (Leslie Forbes, opium trade, see NYTimes or The Independent for reviews), but this one left me anticipating the next installment. In the meantime, I've been having fun w/ the website, http://www.ibistrilogy.com/
My one complaint would probably be that Ghosh got waaaay more into trying to re-create period dialects and slang than needed - a little for flavor is awesome, but there were pages that made me flashback to trying to read Clockwork Orange sans that stupid little mini-dictionary.