Forgive me for not knowing completely where to stand on this one. On one hand the dirty degradation of the characters, the grimy detail and the brutal unsympathetic nature of it all but then, on this other hand, it is a story about Indians being shipped to Guyana to replace the slaves on plantations. So not exactly sunshine.

I was actually expecting to come out of reading this book slightly more enlightened about that period of empire but I found it very hard to keep it up. The narrative flits around, never sticking to a subject for long enough, feeling unfulfilled. The characters where uninteresting. Nothing was keeping me reading to the end but the premise. ( )