Episode: Ep670: Open Book: Amitav Ghosh and Alexander Baron

Mariella talks to award-winning author Amitav Ghosh about River of Smoke - the second book in his Ibis Trilogy set in the waterways around Canton during the events leading up to the start of the First Opium War in 1839. In this week's Reading Clinic, author Joanna Kavenna recommends fiction in which women rise like a phoenix from the ashes. And writer and poet Iain Sinclair explains why Alexander Baron, the British novelist of the Second World War, should be rediscovered and re-read.