Question 7
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Narrated by:
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Richard Flanagan
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By:
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Richard Flanagan
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
**WINNER of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024**
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.
'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
'There’s so much . . . in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir . . . That it is a masterpiece is without question' Observer
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)
What listeners say about Question 7
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- ARW
- 19-08-24
Outstanding
Very hard to summarise! Moving and reflective weaving together of family memoir, science fiction and science. Fascinating and narrated well by the author.
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- Chloe Alexander
- 16-08-24
An astonishing and beautiful book
Possibly the finest book I've ever read and ever had read to me. I can't begin to describe the links in Flanagan's chain reaction of narratives, but it's all mesmerisingly set out in such simple yet breathtakingly beautiful language that we are held on a journey of wonder all the way through. Cannot recommend this book highly enough and his reading of it is impeccable.
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- Chooby
- 08-08-24
An Incredible Book
This book is a rare thing, packed with truth and understanding covering horrendous misdeeds of the human race yet balanced with love.
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