Richard Flanagan Knihy

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, 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. Hailed as a masterpiece, Richard Flanagan’s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man’s reckoning with the truth.

Is Tasmanian salmon one big lie? In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world's best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine conditions. What could be more appealing than the idea of Atlantic salmon sustainably harvested in some of the world's purest waters? But what are we eating when we eat Tasmanian salmon? Richard Flanagan's expose of the salmon farming industry in Tasmania is chilling. In the way that Rachel Carson took on the pesticide industry in her ground-breaking book Silent Spring, Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing. From the burning forests of the Amazon to the petrochemicals you aren't told about to the endangered species being pushed to extinction you don't know about; from synthetically pink-dyed flesh to seal bombs . . . If you care about what you eat, if you care about the environment, this is a book you need to read. Toxic is set to become a landmark book of the twenty-first century.

From the author of the Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North comes a wrenching novel of family, climate change, and the resilience of the human spirit--an elegy to our disappearing world. 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, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she instead turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes 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, though no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive, stay the course that she and her brothers have set. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into an eerily gorgeous story about hope and love, hospital beds and orange-bellied parrots, beauty and solitude and regret. An ember storm of a novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams lays bare the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world, and makes an impassioned plea to avert our shared fate.

'Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan's greatest yet' Guardian 'A masterpiece' Mark Haddon This is a book about the choices we make and the chain reaction that follows . . . 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 daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die. Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place. Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science, and memory, Question 7 shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves. 'I was fascinated, troubled, and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work... I can think of nothing else quite like it' Sarah Perry 'Mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet' Laura Cumming 'Spectacular . . . It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me' Colm Tóibín

A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land, The Sound of One Hand Clapping was both critically acclaimed and a best-seller in Australia. It is a virtuoso performance from an Australian who is emerging as one of our most talented new storytellers. It was 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, where 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. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the barbarism of an old world left behind, about the harshness of a new country, and the destiny of those in a land beyond hope who seek to redeem themselves through love.

THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014'S MAGNIFICENT FIRST NOVEL 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 the rainforest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped bare of their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking. As the river rises his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of the past Aljaz discovers the soul of his country.

The book explores the paradox of modern non-freedom, juxtaposing traditional images of oppression with contemporary consumerism. It critiques how the allure of technology and consumer goods, like iPads and iPhones, shapes perceptions of worth and happiness in the Western world. The narrative delves into the unsettling realities behind these products, including ethical concerns and the commodification of beauty, prompting readers to reconsider the true cost of their desires in a society increasingly defined by materialism.

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, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she instead turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes 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, yet 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 an eerily beautiful story of grief and possibility, of loss and love and orange-bellied parrots. Hailed on publication in Australia as Flanagan's greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm illuminating what remains to us when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope

In 1828, before all living things were destroyed, William Buelow Gould, a convict in Van Dieman's Land, fell in love with a black woman and discovered, too late, that love is not safe.

Six weeks to write for your life... In this blistering story of a ghostwriter haunted by his demonic subject, the Man Booker Prize winner turns to lies, crime and literature with devastating effect A young and penniless writer, Kif Kehlmann, 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 proposes a deal: $10,000 for Kehlmann to ghostwrite his memoir in six weeks. Kehlmann accepts but begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. As the deadline draws closer, he becomes ever more unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Heidl is rewriting him-his life, his future. Everything that was certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder: who is Siegfried Heidl-and who is Kif Kehlmann? By turns compelling, comic and chilling, First Person is a haunting journey into the heart of our age.