First Person

byRichard Flanagan, David James (Read by)

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Random House presents the audiobook edition of First Person by Richard Flanagan, read by David James.

Six weeks to write for your life... In this blistering story of a ghostwriter haunted by his demonic subject, the Man Booker Prize winner turns to lies, crime and literature with devastating effect

A young and penniless writer, Kif Kehlmann, is rung in the middle of the night by the notorious con man and corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl proposes a deal: $10,000 for Kehlmann to ghostwrite his memoir in six weeks.

Kehlmann accepts but begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. As the deadline draws closer, he becomes ever more unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Heidl is rewriting him—his life, his future. Everything that was certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder: who is Siegfried Heidl—and who is Kif Kehlmann?

By turns compelling, comic and chilling, First Person is a haunting journey into the heart of our age.

First Person is both comic and frightening. At times I caught a glimpse of Money-era Martin Amis in Flanagan’s satirical asides on the Australian publishing industry… And there’s a hint, too, of an epochal gloom that is redolent of the The Great Gatsby. Yet there are also passages touched with the virtuosity that shone so brightly in The Narrow Road that are pure Flanagan… Studded with sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life
Carl Wilkinson, Financial Times

There’s some wonderful writing about Tasmania and the wild kayaking exploits which the narrator and Ray enjoyed, at the risk of their lives, in their youth. There is some very fine descriptive writing and narrative passages that go with a swing. There’s the sadness of lives gone wrong or torn apart, the desolation that is the consequence of family break-up. Yet the strength of the novel rests in its mordant intelligence, in its recognition that the world today is essentially Ziggy’s, one of make-believe and denial… Absorbing
Allan Massie, Scotsman

About Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan has been described by the Washington Post as ‘one of our greatest living novelists’ and as ‘among the most versatile writers in the English language’ by the New York Review of Books. He won the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish and the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Question 7 was shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger and the Prix du meilleur livre étranger as a novel, and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is the first and only author ever to have won both the Booker and Baillie Gifford prizes.

A major television series of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is forthcoming, directed by Justin Kurzel and starring Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds.

Details

Imprint: Vintage Digital
Published: 23/11/2017
ISBN: 9781473552845
Length: 802 minutes
Price: £12.00

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Paperback 2018
Ebook 2017
Audio Download 2017

First Person

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The novel, with its switch backing recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing

Perhaps the most prodigal account of writer’s block ever written… Despite some sprightly satirical sallies, mostly about publishing, First Person is a serious treatment of important modern issues (corporate corruption, exploitation of trust, the impudent dismissal of truth)

A black comedy about the unreliability of memory and the warped values of modern publishing... the beauty of First Person is the way it blossoms into a much richer novel than that outline scenario suggests.... readable and thought-provoking

A dark, occasionally demented book, that is as unsettling as it is inspired

Electric tension... a smart, slippery novel pitched between book-world satire, psychological thriller and state-of-Australia analysis

Richard Flanagan is an ardent voice

The real joy of [First Person] is the intensity of its honesty and its writing. This is a book of demonic possession, of obsession, and there’s a zinger of thought, of expression, in every paragraph.

Flanagan is scathingly funny about the world of publishing as seen from the point of view of an unpublished writer, but this is also a profound and thought-provoking novel that explores the nature of truth, lies and fiction

About Richard Flanagan

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