Gappah's collection of 13 stories, An Elegy for Easterly, tells of the lives of people, rich and poor, caught up in events over which they have little control.
Poor catches in recent years, she insisted, were part of the normal cycle of bad years and good, caused by the changing conditions in the estuaries where the shrimp eggs hatch.
A self-made man who has staked his fortunes on one massive shipment of opium, Bahram is paradoxically rich and poor, caught between a group of British merchants who swear by "the elemental force of Free Trade" and a Chinese establishment eager to root out the commerce in opium.
Strong international supplies of some of our more popular species, like cod, put pressure on prices for whitefish and our prawn fleet had a challenging year with unusually poor catches although the signs for the 2014 fishery are more encouraging.
Unless educators figure out how the poor can catch up, not learn more slowly, upward mobility will not improve.
As this newspaper pointed out last week, the clever are marrying the clever and manically educating their children, making it ever harder for the poor to catch up.
