Editions

Wanting

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781784702922

  • Length: 272  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 17mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 192g

  • RRP: £8.99

Wanting

FROM THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014

Mathinna, an Aboriginal girl from Van Diemen’s Land, is adopted by nineteenth-century explorer, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane. Franklin is confident that shining the light of reason on Mathinna will lift her out of savagery and desire. But when Franklin dies on an Arctic expedition, Lady Jane writes to Charles Dickens, asking him to defend Franklin’s reputation amid rumours of his crew lapsing into cannibalism.

Dickens responds by staging a play in which he takes the leading role as Franklin, his symbol of reason’s triumph, only to fall in love with an eighteen-year-old actress. As reason gives way to wanting, the frontier between civilisation and barbarity dissolves, and Mathinna, now a teenage prostitute, goes drinking on a fatal night.

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781784702922

  • Length: 272  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 17mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 192g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • Exquisite

    New Yorker

  • Fascinating

    New York Times

  • Irresistibly good

    The Times

  • Dazzling... A captivating tale of cruelty and disappointment

    Washington Post

  • Richard Flanagan is a master

    Guardian

  • A beautifully constructed fugue on desire and its denial

    Times Literary Supplement

  • This is the best novel I have read this year or expect to read for several more... Wanting shakes us rudely from our stupors, wakes us up to history. There can be no author more passionate or unfettered than Flanagan

    Sydney Morning Herald

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About the Author

Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and The Narrow Road to the Deep North 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.

Richard Flanagan

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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.'
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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
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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

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