Willoughby Book Talk

Question 7

by Richard Flanagan

Knopf, 2024

288 pages

An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with his life and family, and the role of fiction in our times

Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life…

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 and the stories we invent about ourselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RICHARD FLANAGAN was born in Tasmania in 1961. Richard Flanagan is a novelist, historian and film director. He is the author of several history books and other works of non-fiction, while his novels include Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (a film adaptation was directed by Flanagan himself), Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and First Person. They have received numerous honours and are published in over 40 countries.

Flanagan, who has worked as a labourer and river guide, is also an award-winning journalist, on subjects including politics and the environment, and is an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, to which he donated his $40,000 prize money after being awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Prize in 2014.

Flanagan’s eight novels have received numerous honors and are published in forty-two countries. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish and the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. He lives in Tasmania, Australia.

REVIEWS

“A memoir, a collection of micro-biographies, an essay, a prose poem. . . . While immensely personal, this gorgeously unclassifiable book also covers millennia of social and natural history as it offers an elegy to our ravaged Earth. An indelible experience.” —Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust

“A soulful book [that] reverberates long after reading. Richard Flanagan’s writing talent is something almost otherworldly.” —Baillie Gifford Prize judging panel

“The writing exerts an irresistible power.” — New York Times Book Review

“Highly original. . . . Richard Flanagan’s brilliant Question 7 defies categorization.” — Washington Post

“A masterpiece. . . . Fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down." —Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“We are all competitive, of course, so this is not an easy thing to say: but Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years.” —Peter Carey, Sydney Morning Herald

'“Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet. . . . So very personal and so very universal that it’s hard to shake.” — The Guardian

“Extraordinary. . . It is not often that a book forces you to put it down repeatedly because you feel shaky. Question 7 did that to me. It is that good.” —James McConnachie, The Sunday Times