Showing results for "richard flanagan" in Literature & Fiction

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying 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, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others.

August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

Widely regarded as a classic in Australian literature, Richard Flanagan's debut novel takes us on a swirling journey into Tasmania's past and our river guide's own violent ancestral secrets. Beneath a waterfall on the Franklin, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, lies drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears.

In 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, Bojan Buloh had brought his family to start a new life away from Slovenia, the privations of war, and refugee settlements. One night, Bojan's wife walked off into a blizzard, never to return - leaving Bojan to drink too much to quiet his ghosts, and to care for his three-year-old daughter, Sonja, alone. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors.

Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all the living things on the land and the fishes in the sea were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a convict in Van Dieman's Land who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer, forger, fantasist, was condemned to live in the most brutal penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Once upon a time, miraculous things happened....

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.

The new novel from the internationally acclaimed, best-selling writer Richard Flanagan.A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is adopted by the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, to show that the savage can be civilised. When Sir John disappears while looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, Lady Jane turns to the great novelist Charles Dickens for help.

Welcome to Barton Mallet, a remote village in the Midlands that has been chosen as the unlikely location for a new feature film from Hollywood producer Max Crow. Teenagers from the local drama group are encouraged to audition for a story about the trials and tribulations of growing up. Benjamin Knot, the CEO of a well-known architecture firm, discovers that his children, Lily and Nathan, have each been offered a role. But Barton Mallet has a deep wound that has never truly healed.

After a one-night stand with an attractive stranger, pole-dancer Gina Davies finds herself prime suspect in an attempted terrorist attack on Sydney. Hunted by the police, her face stares back at her on the unremitting 24/7 news cycle. She is soon running away from her dreams for a better life and witnessing every truth turn into a betrayal.

Kif Kehlmann, a young penniless writer, 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 offers Kehlmann the job of ghostwriting his memoir. He has six weeks to write the book, for which he'll be paid $10,000.

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life in the New Forest. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he likes his familiar habits and routines. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now. Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul: she doesn’t stay still long enough for a habit or routine. She’s currently on a private island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job. Then a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer with their sights on Amy mean an end to Steve’s quiet life.

PLAYGROUND follows four lives – a marine biologist, an artist, a schoolteacher, and an AI pioneer – that intersect on an island in French Polynesia when it is chosen as a base for seasteading, humanity’s next great adventure.

A thrilling tale and powerful love story that tells the heroic and tragic true story of the German resistance in World War II. When Hitler comes to power in 1933, a tight-knit group of friends and lovers become hunted outlaws overnight. United in their resistance to the madness and tyranny of Nazism, they must flee the country. Dora, passionate and fearless, her lover, the great playwright Ernst Toller, her younger cousin Ruth and Ruth's husband, Hans, find refuge in London.

Meet Otto and Cecil. Two brothers who grew up privileged in the Welsh countryside. They enjoyed watching nature shows, playing with their pet pony, impersonating their Grandfather…and killing the help. Murder is the family business after all. Downton Abbey, this is not. However, it’s not so easy to continue the family legacy with the constant stream of threats and distractions seemingly leaping from the hedgerow.

It's been centuries since mortals unlocked the secrets of the Fate System and overthrew Mount Olympus. Kairos, a young pirate with the ability to speak with animals, has an ambition: to ascend as the newest deity of a flooded world. But divine power is not given. It is taken. Now Kairos must sail the endless sea, tame fearsome monsters, and conquer new lands. The challenges are many, but he will face them all. For Kairos is a cunning [Rogue] indeed....

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric firsthand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile.