Richard Flanagan

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
- Richard Flanagan
An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving—and astonishing—best.

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.

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Ghost writing and criminal minds

'A life isn't an onion to be peeled, a palimpsest to be scraped back to some original, truer meaning. It's an invention that never ends.'

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The novels of Richard Flanagan

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Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan talks about the events which inspired The Narrow Road to the Deep North including his own experiences as a child of Burma's Death Railway

Richard Flanagan's novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting, and First Person have received numerous honours and are published in 42 countries. He won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014.

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Richard Flanagan

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams