Mapped
Burmese Days
George Orwell
Orwell's fictional station of Kyauktada is the real town of Katha on the Irrawaddy in Upper Burma, where he served in the Imperial Police in 1926-27. The map holds the small world of the novel: the European Club at its poisonous centre, the bazaar and the maidan, the river and its jetty, and the jungle beyond where Flory keeps his teak camp. It brings Myanmar and the colonial Irrawaddy into the atlas.
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The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh's saga opens in 1885 as the British storm the royal palace at Mandalay and depose the last Burmese king, and follows the orphan Rajkumar, who rises from that day's chaos to a teak fortune, across three generations and three countries. Burma is the heart: the Glass Palace and the sack of Mandalay, and the teak port of Rangoon. Beyond it lie the Indian town of Ratnagiri, where the exiled king is held, and the rubber estates of Malaya where the family's later fortunes are made and broken.
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