Showing results by narrator "Richard Flanagan" in All Categories

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.

August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian 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. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani sought asylum in Australia but was instead illegally imprisoned in the country’s most notorious detention centre on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Behrouz Boochani spent nearly five years typing passages of this book one text at a time from a secret mobile phone in prison. Compiled and translated from Farsi, they form an incredible story of how escaping political persecution in Iran, he ended up trapped as a stateless person. 

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. 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 groundbreaking book Silent Spring, Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing.