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First Published:
May 2007, 336 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2008, 336 pages
Book Reviewed by:
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This article relates to The Unknown Terrorist
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 wrote four history books before turning to fiction. The Unknown
Terrorist is his fourth novel following Death of a River Guide (1994), The Sound of One
Hand Clapping (1997) and Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001).
He lives in Tasmania with his wife and three children. He is
a keen canoeist, having canoed the Franklin River thirteen times, and was a
member of the first expedition to canoe the Jane River and Gordon Gorge (one of
his nonfiction works is A Terrible Beauty - History of the Gordon, 1985).
Did you know?
In his author's note, Flanagan acknowledges that the plot of The Unknown
Terrorist owes much to Heinrich Böll's
1974 novel, In Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum). Böll's novel told the story of an ordinary woman driven to
extremes by the persecution of the tabloid press. Interestingly, Böll's story was in turn inspired by Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre
(The Criminal by Reason of Lost Honor), which was published in 1786, just
before the French Revolution.
This article relates to The Unknown Terrorist.
It first ran in the May 10, 2007
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