Richard Flanagan

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
- Richard Flanagan
'Striking...brilliantly done' The Times

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

Anna's aged mother is dying - if her three children would just allow it. Forced by their pity to stay alive, 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, love and orange-bellied parrots.

'One of our greatest living novelists' Washington Post

Podcasts

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.'

/content/dam/prh/articles/archive/richard-flanagan-life-according-to-article-snippet-788x308.jpg

Recommendations

The novels of Richard Flanagan

Journalist Kim Forrester looks back at Richard Flanagan, considered ‘Australia’s best kept secret’ until he won the Man Booker Prize in 2014

Features

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.

We use cookies on this site to enable certain parts of the site to function and to collect information about your use of the site so that we can improve our visitors’ experience.

Richard Flanagan

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams