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...