First Person

Select a format:

Retailers:

Amazon Blackwells Bookshop.org Foyles Hive Waterstones WHSmith

Summary

FROM THE BESTSELLING BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR

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 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?

'Both comic and frightening... Studded with sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life' Financial Times

'Enigmatic and mesmerizing' New Yorker

'As unsettling as it is inspired' Esquire UK

Reviews

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
Carl Wilkinson, Financial Times

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 Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish and the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Question 7 was shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger and the Prix du meilleur livre étranger as a novel, and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is the first and only author ever to have won both the Booker and Baillie Gifford prizes.

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