The Glass Palace

The Glass Palace is a historical novel by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, published in 2000.

The book begins with the Third Anglo-Burmese War and the fall of the Konbaung dynasty, when the royal family is removed from the palace in Mandalay and taken into exile, and it follows the people who were standing near them at that moment through the decades afterwards. Rajkumar is a boy with nobody, who learns the timber trade and prospers in it; Dolly was an attendant to the queen, and their connection runs through the book and through the families that come after them. Around that the novel covers the economic collapse of Burma, the growth of rubber and timber plantations, the position of Indians serving in the British army and the Second World War, which arrives with the Japanese invasion. Ghosh tells the story across Burma, Bengal, India and Malaya, and the book is as much about what colonial rule did to the region as about the families in it.

Ghosh's other novels deal with related parts of the world, and this one is the widest of them in scope.