'Truth is stranger than fiction,' Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator, the travelogue that included his visit to Australia. And 'Aust­ralian history.' he decided, 'does not read like history, but like the most beautiful of lies … but they are all true, they all happened.'Fiction and identity have been significant themes of Richard Flanagan’s work, with most of his books exploring the blurred borders between­ history and narrative, the public and the personal, truth and invention. (Introduction)