From the award-winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North comes a bravura love letter to Tasmania by way of H.G. Wells, nuclear physics and Hiroshima, all rendered in sublime, page-turning prose.
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2024
Who loves longer?
Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love 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 it shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781784745677
Number of pages: 288
Weight: 395 g
Dimensions: 222 x 142 x 28 mm
'This book took me completely by surprise and is unlike anything I’ve read this year. Gripping, affecting, wholly original. I absolutely loved it' - David Nicholls, author of One Day
A work of non-fiction…but it has all the complexity of emotional heft of a great novel… Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be - Sunday Times
'Irresistible. . . . What Flanagan achieves so well is locating what is intimately human within his grand sweep. . . . The attention he pays is tender without ever sacrificing the sharpness of his gaze' - Chris Power, New York Times Book Review
‘Question 7 is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read - and this is hardly to touch on its originality. I was amazed by its intense moral and emotional rigour, its power of compassion, the strength and beauty of the prose. I would take it up, read a page, sometimes just a paragraph, and find I had to set it down, dazed, to think about every word and idea before I could even begin to go on. Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet’ - Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap
'We believe we make choices in our lives, yet what explodes in these pages is the way in which the fiercest and strongest response we can make to the forces that threaten to destroy us is to surrender to love' - Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works
There’s so much…in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir… That it is a masterpiece is without question - Observer
'Question 7 is written with a spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control, care. It is a kind of reckoning, Richard Flanagan with his father and his mother, Tasmania with its past, Japan with its past, the author with himself. It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me' - Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
Excellent…Flanagan is unfailingly good company - Daily Mail
'Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a profoundly moving love song for the writer’s parents, a forensic excavation, a lament, a confession, a jig-saw puzzle in which Hiroshima connects to HG Wells, and the Martians colonise Tasmania. 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, author of True History of The Kelly Gang
Flanagan’s portrayal of his quiet, brave father and his loving, resilient mother is exquisite. His evocation of the texture of life in rural Tasmania is masterful… Flanagan is unfailingly good company - Daily Telegraph, 4* review
Richard Flanagan is the author of some eight novels: his debut “Death of a River Guide” is about a man facing death trapped by a rock in Tasmania’s Franklin River after a Kayakan expedition he is leading goes wrong;... More
HG Wells meets a young woman and begins a torrid affair that influences his later writing. A talented scientist realises that the power of the atom could be uses to create a devastating weapon. The crew of a bomber... More
Intrigued and genuinely enthused to read....however I found it simply too hard to enjoy and on reflection feel like one has to persevere rather than want to continue reading.....interesting in parts yes...but not a... More
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