Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Smoke and Ashes, by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A hybrid of horticultural and economic history, this book proposes that the opium poppy should be taken as “a historical force in its own right.” Ghosh touches on opium’s origins as a recreational drug—it was favored in the courts of the Mongol, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, each of which enhanced its potency in different ways—but he dwells on its use by Western colonizers. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British began a campaign to get the Chinese population hooked on opium produced in India, in the hope of correcting a trade imbalance. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Remembering Peasants, by Patrick Joyce (Scribner). In this elegiac history, Joyce presents a painstaking account of a way of life to which, until recently, the vast majority of humanity was bound. Delving into the rhythms and rituals of peasant existence, Joyce shows how different our land-working ancestors were from us in their understanding of time, nature, and the body. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes (Black Cat). In this capacious, broody work of speculative fiction, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, a Dutch microbiologist who had a turbulent childhood joins expeditions to the center of the earth and to the far reaches of space: first to a hydrothermal vent deep in the Atlantic Ocean, then to the rim of the Oort cloud, a sphere of icy objects surrounding our solar system. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf). This amusing and macabre début novel follows a Tehran-born poet who decides to write a book about martyrs as a prelude to becoming one himself. The poet, who is grieving the death of his parents, struggles to find direction in life until he learns that a dying Iranian artist is spending her final days as a human exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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