Question 7

**Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024** 
 
'A work of non-fiction . . . but it has all the complexity of emotional heft of a great novel . . . Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be' Sunday Times 
 
'There’s so much . . . in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir . . . That it is a masterpiece is without question' Observer 
 
This is a book about the choices we make and the chain reaction that follows . . . 
 
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair, through 1930s nuclear physics, to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die. 
 
Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place. 
 
Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science, and memory, Question 7 shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves. 
 
‘I was fascinated, troubled, and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work... I can think of nothing else quite like it’ Sarah Perry 
 
‘Mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet’ Laura Cumming 
 
'Spectacular . . . It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me' Colm Tóibín 
 
'Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet' Guardian 
 
‘Fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down’ Mark Haddon 
 
Richard Flanagan, Winner of the Booker Prize 2014

'This book took me completely by surprise and is unlike anything I’ve read this year. Gripping, affecting, wholly original. I absolutely loved it'

A work of non-fiction…but it has all the complexity of emotional heft of a great novel… Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be

‘Question 7 is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read - and this is hardly to touch on its originality. I was amazed by its intense moral and emotional rigour, its power of compassion, the strength and beauty of the prose. I would take it up, read a page, sometimes just a paragraph, and find I had to set it down, dazed, to think about every word and idea before I could even begin to go on. Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet’

'We believe we make choices in our lives, yet what explodes in these pages is the way in which the fiercest and strongest response we can make to the forces that threaten to destroy us is to surrender to love'

There’s so much…in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir… That it is a masterpiece is without question

'Question 7 is written with a spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control, care. It is a kind of reckoning, Richard Flanagan with his father and his mother, Tasmania with its past, Japan with its past, the author with himself. It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me'

Excellent…Flanagan is unfailingly good company

'Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a profoundly moving love song for the writer’s parents, a forensic excavation, a lament, a confession, a jig-saw puzzle in which Hiroshima connects to HG Wells, and the Martians colonise Tasmania. We are all competitive, of course, so this is not an easy thing to say: but Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years'

Peter Carey, author of True History of The Kelly Gang

Flanagan’s portrayal of his quiet, brave father and his loving, resilient mother is exquisite. His evocation of the texture of life in rural Tas­mania is masterful… Flanagan is unfailingly good company

A deeply personal book that I found mesmerising

'Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is a book itching to be quoted and underlined. A high-reaching philosophical enquiry that is also fully personal, it contains indelible, morally piercing moments about atrocity, inheritance, nature and the colonial experience. His section on Oxford in the 80s should be required reading at A level. I thought it was outstanding'

Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren

A book that rejoices, and succeeds, in resisting definition… [Question 7 is] a reminder of just what a remarkable writer Richard Flanagan can be

'Question 7 is a brilliant, brilliant book'

James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral

‘I was fascinated, troubled and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work: part memoir, part love-letter to the place and people of Tasmania, and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of cause and effect... I can think of nothing else quite like it’

A writer full of dazzling talents… [Question 7 is] deeply affecting

‘Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is a memoir about his parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West… it is fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down. A masterpiece’

Words are Flanagan’s salvation: he strings them together to make mesmerising sentences… accompanying him on his literary quest is a transformative experience

'Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is such a book. It holds a life between its covers and while you read, it holds you too. A celebration of all life, it is also a reckoning with the 20th century and what it revealed about us to ourselves. It is intimate, beautiful, unsparing and profound. It nudges at eternity, and then comes back home, to decency and love'

'Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent'

Flanagan’s finest book... A brilliant meditation on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence.… Flanagan explores old, razed and sacred ground... the Japanese death railway, white Australia’s Black history, the convict and settler bloodlines of fertile Tasmanian country, and the cold rapids of the mighty Franklin River.… While reading I found myself abruptly shutting the book again and again and steadying my own heart with a hand at my throat. Only the best writing is so affecting that a reader has a physical reaction... I was deeply moved.... the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy... tuned as finely as W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn

'It’s a big call to make for a Booker winner, but Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet. This elegiac, chaptered essay touches on ideas that have haunted his fiction for years: his father was a PoW in Japan for three years during the second world war and was freed after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands died – but because of that event, 16 years later Flanagan would be born in Tasmania. Question 7 is Flanagan’s painful and powerful examination of the psychic implications of what it means to be alive directly because so many people died – a deeply existential conundrum that is so very personal and so very universal, that it’s hard to shake'

Thoughtful and often beautiful… Flanagan is a riveting writer… [Question 7 explores] what it means to be a thinking person with…a past that stretches as far back as you can bear to think

I’ve loved Question 7 by Richard Flanagan – he is a writer of such extraordinary imagination and elegance. His latest book is breathtakingly good; it’s astonishing

'Flanagan reads [the audiobook] with immense sensitivity and care, weighing the unfathomable moral calculus that war and violence beget, alongside truly moving vignettes of his upbringing, his relationship with his parents and their deaths. Woven in are portraits of atomic scientists, of the perpetrators of war crimes, of survivors and — unexpectedly — of the writers HG Wells and Rebecca West. At moments you can almost hear Flanagan’s astonishment at the depth of his material, and of the suffering he recounts; and yet he is such a powerful narrator that there are also moments of joy and wonder’

'Moving ... This thought-provoking book will make you re-examine your own [life]'

'Flanagan is a master storyteller ... A book of pithy, profound observations as well as engaging meanderings. Mr Flanagan is not afraid of the big questions, namely: What is time? What is love? What is memory? The answer to that last question helps to explain this challenging, rewarding book'

'Leav[es] you dizzy ... accompanying [Flanagan] on his literary quest is a transformative experience'

'Thoughtful and often beautiful, moving without effort between the very big and the apparently very small. Flanagan is a riveting writer'

The best book that I’ve read in the last year

'A memoir about [Flanagan's] parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West . . . Fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down. A masterpiece’ Mark Haddon 
 
'Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet’ Laura Cumming 
 
Who loves longer? 
 
Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. 
 
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair, through 1930s nuclear physics, to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die. 
 
Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place. Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science and memory it shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves. 
 
'Spectacular . . . It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me' Colm Tóibín 
 
‘Magnificent’ Tim Winton 
 
'It’s a big call to make for a Booker winner, but Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet' Guardian (Australia) 
 
'Brilliant . . . While reading I found myself abruptly shutting the book again and again and steadying my own heart with a hand at my throat' Tara June Winch

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

From the Booker prize-winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The visceral new novel from Booker prizewinner Richard Flanagan: a wild and urgent story about family, love and hope set against global catastrophe and climate crisis

Ambitious, powerful... There is much to enjoy and admire in this novel... Flanagan writes with a startling brilliance

A fiercely well-observed account of the psychological twists and turns, the stress points and the double-binds, of familial love

Richard Flanagan is one of the greatest writers at work in the world today - I admire him and his writing immensely. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a haunting, urgent and important book about our broken and confusing age

Striking... brilliantly done... Flanagan is wise enough to place his wider concerns, and the accompanying magic realism within the sturdy framework of a conventional family narrative

Magnificent... Flanagan hasn't just written about the space between living and dying; in writing about the things that are disappearing from the world he's captured something fundamental about the moment we're living in

Pure and simple... A book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects... What impresses most, however, is that Flanagan's novel doesn't end in condemnation. It keeps searching for the proper form for love

Flanagan has delivered a book that both distills the literary qualities for which he has been celebrated for more than a quarter of a century and recasts our ideas about the kind of writer he is and what he can do. This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical... What an astonishing book this is

An extraordinary tour de force, utterly compelling... It's a heartfelt, urgent plea to restore our connection to the world before it's too late

Scotland on Sunday, *Books to Look Out For 2020*

[Flanagan's] prose has a pyrotechnic brilliance

There's much beauty and hope to be found in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

'Striking...brilliantly done' The Times 
 
An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best. 
 
Anna's aged mother is dying - if her three children would just allow it. Forced by their pity to stay alive, she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight. 
 
When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope, love and orange-bellied parrots. 
 
'One of our greatest living novelists' Washington Post

First Person

The Man Booker Prize winner turns to lies, crime and literature in this blistering story of a ghostwriter haunted by his demonic subject

First Person is both comic and frightening. At times I caught a glimpse of Money-era Martin Amis in Flanagan’s satirical asides on the Australian publishing industry… And there’s a hint, too, of an epochal gloom that is redolent of the The Great Gatsby. Yet there are also passages touched with the virtuosity that shone so brightly in The Narrow Road that are pure Flanagan… Studded with sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life

The novel, with its switch backing recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing

Perhaps the most prodigal account of writer’s block ever written… Despite some sprightly satirical sallies, mostly about publishing, First Person is a serious treatment of important modern issues (corporate corruption, exploitation of trust, the impudent dismissal of truth)

A black comedy about the unreliability of memory and the warped values of modern publishing... the beauty of First Person is the way it blossoms into a much richer novel than that outline scenario suggests.... readable and thought-provoking

A dark, occasionally demented book, that is as unsettling as it is inspired

Electric tension... a smart, slippery novel pitched between book-world satire, psychological thriller and state-of-Australia analysis

There’s some wonderful writing about Tasmania and the wild kayaking exploits which the narrator and Ray enjoyed, at the risk of their lives, in their youth. There is some very fine descriptive writing and narrative passages that go with a swing. There’s the sadness of lives gone wrong or torn apart, the desolation that is the consequence of family break-up. Yet the strength of the novel rests in its mordant intelligence, in its recognition that the world today is essentially Ziggy’s, one of make-believe and denial… Absorbing

The real joy of [First Person] is the intensity of its honesty and its writing. This is a book of demonic possession, of obsession, and there’s a zinger of thought, of expression, in every paragraph.

Flanagan is scathingly funny about the world of publishing as seen from the point of view of an unpublished writer, but this is also a profound and thought-provoking novel that explores the nature of truth, lies and fiction

First Person is a work that crawls under the reader’s skin for its duration. Harrowing in how it lampoons the publishing industry, Flanagan unflinchingly reflects on how social predators within such circles prey on those with a shred of hope or joy until nothing is left of their original identity

The writing and structure are exceptionally good. Richard has fantastic finesse with the use of language and the enviable ability of describing a lot in concentrated amounts… It has a reflective after burn, which I always rate as a skill in its own right, and so it is definitely one, if tempted to, you ought to give it a go. The writing is impressive and most definitely unique

The book is convincing as an exploration of ourselves and the meaning of identity and truth in a "fake news" world.

Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and The Narrow Road to the Deep North have received numerous honours and are published in 42 countries. He won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014.

Young and penniless, Kif Kehlmann, is rung in the middle of the night by notorious con man and corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl proposes a deal: $10,000 for Kehlmann to ghostwrite his memoir in six weeks. 
 
Kehlmann accepts but soon begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. Is he ghostwriting a memoir, or is Heidl is rewriting him? As the deadline draws closer everything that is certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder: who is Ziggy Heidl - and who is Kif Kehlmann?

Gould's Book of Fish

Gloriously eccentric, Gould's Book of Fish reinvents the novel, telling its story through 12 different fish, from the Pot-bellied Seahorse to the Weedy Seadragon

Lyrical and hilarious, tender and wildly angry by turns, it dazzlingly reconceives the form of the novel

Gould's Book of Fish is a novel about fish in the way that Moby-Dick is a novel about whales, Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day

Hugely original... Passages burn with the intense pleasure of story-making, of the abandon that comes from a seething of ideas and their joyful mutation into words

As beautiful to look at as it was enthralling to read

Hugely involving, clever, witty and tender

Magical-realist colonial-protest novel, Borgesian found-manuscript tale, anti-Enlightenment Foucauldian fable, shaggy dog story, parody, satire on modern Tasmania - the list could go on... Flanagan somehow makes it work on the page - largely through the mighty voice he has devised for Gould, which echoes with rageful humour

Bewitching... Flanagan's writing has the unmistakable shimmer of literary star quality

I have read nothing finer than Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. Lyrical and hilarious, tender and wildly angry by turns, it reimagines the grim early history of Tasmania and at the same time dazzlingly reconceives the form of the novel

Magic realism meets barbarism. Equal parts fantastical and grotesque

Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and The Narrow Road to the Deep North have received numerous honours and are published in 42 countries. He won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014.

FROM THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 
 
Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer and forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish.

Death of a River Guide

2014 Man Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan's debut novel takes us on a swirling journey into Tasmania's past and our river guide's own violent ancestral secrets

This novel of spiritual desolation and  redemption gathers such an awesome, tragic momentum that the fantastical aspects  seem as crucial to the story as do the raging rivers, sheer gorges and imposing  rainforests

Death of a River Guide is possessed of both a fierce, seething energy and a limpid, unexpected tranquillity

One of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing

Death of a River Guide defies superlatives. It is that rare commodity - a wonderful fiction which has pace, depth of feeling, and infinite imaginative possibilities

Combines a rich voice, highly original, with great invention and engrossing narrative pace...very, very good indeed

FROM THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 
 
Trapped within a waterfall on the wild Franklin River, Tasmanian river guide, Aljaz Cosini, lies drowning. As the tourists he has been guiding down the river seek to save him, Aljaz is beset by visions horrible and fabulous. As the rapids rise, Aljaz relives not just his own life but also his country’s dreaming.

The Unknown Terrorist

A novel of startling prescience from the 2014 Man Booker Prize winner about bombs in stadiums, one-night stands, and being on the run

A terrific novel, maintained at fever heat

Stunning... A brilliant meditation upon the post 9/11 world

Flanagan's a novelist and philosopher for our time

It grips from the very first page and forces you to read on to its explosive, tragic climax

A damn good story delivered with the glittering prose that only the rage of just moral anger can achieve. Flanagan's Australia is...a global expression of the unknown terrorist in us all

Genuinely thrilling. The Unknown Terrorist reads like the book of the film it will surely become

A thriller of genuine importance...fired by passionate concern

Nothing short of brilliance. Read this novel now, before it's too late for any of us to understand its message

The Unknown Terrorist is accessible and timely as they come - an intense and thoughtful thriller set in paranoid Sydney ablaze with terrorism fever

Flanagan's theme and style is epic and sweeping... I relished descriptions of a society where cruelty and fear lurk beneath a paper-thin moral veneer

A fast-paced, sexually charged whodunit that suggests a far more complex reality... Flanagan's writing is a brilliant reflection of a world full of steamy sex, drugs and violence, with a touch of high-status voyeurism... The Unknown Terrorist mocks the thriller genre even as it fulfils its expectations

Well observed... Never less than a ballsy, enjoyable read... Like Showgirls written by Don DeLillo instead of Joe Eszterhas

FROM THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 
 
After a one-night stand with an attractive stranger, pole-dancer Gina Davies finds herself prime suspect in an attempted terrorist attack on Sydney. Hunted by the police, her face stares back at her on the unremitting 24/7 news cycle. She is soon running away from her dreams for a better life and witnessing every truth turn into a betrayal. 
 
The Unknown Terrorist is a startlingly prescient novel that drums with the cadences of city life; where fear invades individual lives, pushing one woman ever closer to breaking point.

Richard Flanagan

This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost. 
 
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. 
 
*WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014* 
 
'An unforgettable story of men at war' The Times 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

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