Readers' rating:
Publishes
Sep 17, 2024
288 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with the author's life and family, and the role of fiction in our times
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.
"It's a big call to make for a Booker winner, but Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan's greatest yet...So very personal and so very universal that it's hard to shake." —The Guardian (Best Australian Books of 2023)
"Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. 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 twentieth 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." —Sydney Morning Herald (Books of the Year)
"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." —Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent
"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." —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
"A small masterpiece ... It's a memoir about his parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. That sounds hard going but it is fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down. Also: that cover. Phwoar." —Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
This information about Question 7 was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Pan Macmillan Australia
Descended from Irish convicts transported to Van Diemens Land (later renamed
Tasmania) during the Great Famine, Richard Flanagan was born in his native
island in 1961, the fifth of six children. He spent his childhood in the mining
town of Rosebery and left school at sixteen to work as a bush laborer. He later
attended the University of Tasmania, graduating with first class honours in
1982. The following year he was awarded a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford
University. He later worked as a laborer and river guide.
He wrote four history books before turning to fiction. His first novel, the much
celebrated Death of a River Guide (1994), tells the tale of Aljaz Cosini,
a guide on the Franklin River who lies drowning as he relives his life and the
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