AustLit

'Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows.

'By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying 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, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.' (Publication summary)

'In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living 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 and love and orange-bellied parrots.

'An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving—and astonishing—best.' (Publication summary)

Richard Flanagan discusses the omission of Bob Carr and Germaine Greer from the 2018 Brisbane Writers' Festival line-up.

'First Person, Flanagan’s first novel since winning the Man Booker Prize in 2014, is inspired by Flanagan’s real-life experience ghost-writing the memoir of Australian conman Johann Friedrich Hohenberger.

'The novel is written in the first person by reality TV producer Kif Kehlman and details how Kif, as a younger, penniless writer unable to finish his first novel, agrees to ghost write the memoir of a notorious con man, Ziggy Heidl, who has defrauded the banks of $700 million.

'As work gets underway, Kif begins to fear that he is being corrupted by the con man and grows ever more uncertain as to whether he is ghost writing a memoir, or if Ziggy Heidl is rewriting him.

'At the novel’s heart is a question: what is the truth?' (Publication summary)

'Notes on the exodus of refugees from Syria, by Man Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan. With illustrations from Archibald Prize winner Ben Quilty.

'In January 2016 Richard Flanagan and Ben Quilty travelled to Lebanon, Greece, and Serbia to follow the river that is the exodus of our age: that of refugees from Syria.

'Flanagan's 'notes' and Quilty's sketches bear witness to the remarkable people they met on that journey and their stories. These individual portraits from the Man Booker Prize-winning author and Archibald Prize-winning artist combine to form a powerful testament to human dignity and courage in the face of war, death, and suffering.

'Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and the damned flowing through Europe is my family.' (Publication summary)

'A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.

'August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

'This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.' (Publisher's blurb)

''Maybe if the weather had been different we would have made it. No one had predicted anything like the force-nine gale that turned a calm ocean into a liquid earthquake.'

'A near-fatal kayak trip across the Bass Strait with a friend has author Richard Flanagan contemplating memory and dreams, childhood visions, and the things that really matter in life.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.