Richard Flanagan

"From the author of the Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North comes a wrenching novel of family, climate change, and the resilience of the human spirit--an elegy to our disappearing world. 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, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she instead turns her focus...

Haunted by the death of his wife while attending brutally sick and injured soldiers at a World War II Japanese POW camp, surgeon Dorrigo Evans receives a letter that irrevocably shapes the subsequent decades of his life in Australia. Richard Flanagan's story ? of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor haunted by a love affair with his uncle's wife ? journeys from the caves of Tasmanian trappers in the early twentieth century to a crumbling pre-war beachside...

"By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory...