Showing results by author "Richard Flanagan" in All Categories

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.  

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.

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....

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.

What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in Australia? Gina Davies is about to find out. From the author of the international bestsellers The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Gould's Book of Fish comes a fast-paced thriller that paints a devastating picture of contemporary Australia. Five days, three unexploded bombs, and every truth of your life turned into a lie. What would you do?

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.

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.

Richard Flanagan's speeches have become unique literary events attended by sellout crowds, reported in national and international media, and a spur to widespread debate and discussion. Gathered here are three of his recent speeches in which he interweaves topics as diverse as troubadour poetry, love stories and the murder of the refugee Reza Barati; his top 10 Tasmanian novels and the Australian Pacific solution; and his much-celebrated National Press Club address where he questioned the militarisation of Australian memory and argued for the need for formal Indigenous recognition.