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Question 7
- Narrated by: Richard Flanagan
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
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Question 7
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Summary
Brought to you by Penguin.
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 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, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
Critic reviews
'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)
'Flanagan’s finest book... A brilliant meditation on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence.… Flanagan explores old, razed and sacred ground... the Japanese death railway, white Australia’s Black history, the convict and settler bloodlines of fertile Tasmanian country, and the cold rapids of the mighty Franklin River.… While reading I found myself abruptly shutting the book again and again and steadying my own heart with a hand at my throat. Only the best writing is so affecting that a reader has a physical reaction... I was deeply moved.... the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy... tuned as finely as W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn' (Tara June Winch)