Ghosh introduces his vast novel The Glass Palace, set between 1870 and the end of the Second World War concerning the tensions and accommodations between the British, Indian and the exiled Burmese in the Far East. The Dutch novelist, Moring presents his In Babylon, a novel similarly ambitious. Stranded ia a winter blizzard with his young neice, NIna, Nathan tells her the story of their forefathers, a family of clockmakers who came to the Netherlands from Eastern Europe and then emigrated to America before the Second World War.