Question 7

By: Richard Flanagan

Narrated by: Richard Flanagan

THE WASHINGTON POST'S TOP TEN NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR PRIX FÉMINA ETRANGER • LONGLISTED FOR PRIX MÉDICIS • An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with his life and family, and the role of fiction in our times

"Spectacular. . . A book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island

Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life...

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.

At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

The emotional honesty and careful description of events.

I loved everything about this book. It’s truly indescribable almost heartbreakingly, beautiful and wonderfully read. The way he links history and personal experience is so creative and unusual. It is truly brilliant.

Weaving storylines

Loved the history, "War of the Worlds" with the war in our lives, and the fictions built in it. The Tasmanian genocide and though he doesn't mention it the Irish fighters and famine victims against the English sent to VanDiemans Land as "convicts' . Richard Flanagan has a very good voice to listen to too.

Who loves longer?

Awestruck by his words on a myriad of topics that seem to all merge in the end.

Banality

Arrogance of the author. Pretended to have everything figured out. Discounted all truth as ignorance.