The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

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

Summary

'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

Reviews

  • Pyrotechnic brilliance
    Daily Mail

About the author

Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan has been described by the Washington Post as ‘one of our greatest living novelists’ and as ‘among the most versatile writers in the English language’ by the New York Review of Books. He won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish.


A major television series of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is forthcoming, directed by Justin Kurzel and starring Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more