The Living Sea of Waking Dreams cover art

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

By: Richard Flanagan
Narrated by: Essie Davis
Try Premium Plus free

Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $21.99

Buy Now for $21.99

About this listen

 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 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 story about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.

Read by acclaimed Australian actress Essie Davis.©2020 Richard Flanagan (P)2020 Penguin Random House Australia Fiction Genre Fiction Magical Realism Fantasy Magic
All stars
Most relevant  
Australian to the core, storytelling at it's best, narrated with absolute mastery. Thank you for this sad but brilliant gift.

Simply Outstanding

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A challenging, deeply confronting but endlessly astonishing book. Extraordinarily visual, beautiful writing. A book about death - and life. Moving and disturbingly thought-provoking. Also very beautifully narrated. Thank you, Essie.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Thank you once again Mr. Flanagan. A superb piece of work. A book I know will always be there gently steering me.

Brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
terrible narrator.. sorry. too much interpretation and unable to listen to this one.. read it instead

narrator too much

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I found this not so subtle allegory of disappearing nature and people having body parts too overstated, and the characters extremely stereotyped.
This was a very angry book, but the dying mothers plight was rendered reverently .. like a dying Mother Earth .
I continued listening because I wanted to hear Richard Flanagan’s outpouring of grief and frustration

Brutal and angry

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Hi the reader volume changes so often to very sift then very loud, it made listening ti it uncomfortable and detracted from the book. I couldn’t finish it. I only got a few chapters in

Reading

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Mortality is bad enough but what comes after mortality?

The living sea of waking dreams is a riddle of sorts.

A novel beautifully layered like sedimentary rock cut open like cake and sprinkled with the careless graffiti of anthropocentric footprints. The ribbons of stories create vertigo and the sense of falling (and disappearing) creates a raw stability and clarity to the anxiety inducing clamour of white noise that shatters our ability as humans to stop, think and reflect. Rather we fly, sink and dip like a kite without a string carried in eddies and zephyrs to nowhere.

An apocalyptic novel with hope. Set in Australia. About families and love and our dwindling connection to the natural worls behind our screens (like me now).
A disturbing question is what if our demise as a species is natural and we are happy to see it happen that way? The only way to save ourselves is by dying and being reborn. I wonder if Flanagan is a Buddhist at heart.

Be prepared to be angry, smiling, smug, guilty and reminded that great books are those that tell us that we are not alone in how we think or feel. A great writer has the ability to communicate and see what we can only do in fragments of dreams or broken musings. Words are inadequate. The sea is alive in us as the most primal connection we have to the earth, life and each other. Perhaps we need to go backwards to go forwards. Or be still to feel anything at all.

The inside cover of the book with its closeup of luminous green parrot feathers is beautiful enough to captivate one for a few moments at least. But the novel will do and linger long after the book has closed like the lid of a small bird-sized coffin.

The novel of our times

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Incredible story, fantastically written. Such amazing depth of description and beautifully read by the wonderful Essie Davis. I throughly enjoyed listening.

Wow, just fantastic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It was hard to find the rhythm at first- and then it swept me away.

Breath taking

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Intense, moving, depressing and uplifting, fantastic language and fantastical as well as very relatable and real.

Strange but beautifully written

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.