Death of a River Guide (38 page)

Richard Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961. His novels
Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist
and
Wanting
have received numerous honours and are published in twenty-six countries. He directed a feature-film version of
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
and co-wrote Baz Luhrmann's
Australia
. A collection of his essays is published as
And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?
.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return.

Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present – changing forever his living death and her ordered life …

Since its first publication in 1997, Richard Flanagan's classic story of a migrant family has become one of the most loved literary novels in Australian history.

Praise for
The Sound of One Hand Clapping

‘Heart-wrenching and beautifully written … A rare and remarkable achievement.'—
Los Angeles Times

‘Haunting and unforgettable.'—
The Canberra Times

‘From its wonderfully atmospheric opening to its touching conclusion, this is a heartbreaking story, beautifully told.'—
Literary Review

‘A story about redemptive love, a celebration of the resilience of individuals and of their power to change … deeply moving, eventually uplifting.'—
The Advertiser

‘An almost unbearably sad story … an epic tragedy conducted under the author's microscope which requires fortitude and a man-sized box of tissues to get through … This novel is a passionately literary account of one of this country's formative experiences.'—
The Sunday Age

‘Flanagan is an accomplished ringmaster of despair and tenderness.'—
The Globe and Mail

‘Flanagan imbues this most Australian of stories with a middle European sensibility found in the reserve of characters in Milan Kundera's writings … Flanagan tells an immortal story of faith and hope, its loss and rebirth …
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
is destined to be a classic.'—
Sunday Herald Sun

‘Flanagan makes us care about his central characters and breathes life into dark pockets of history. He underscores the terror and mystery of the landscape with a strange tenderness, a loving attention to the little rituals and memories that serve both to sustain and debilitate the people he writes about.'—
The Weekend Australian

‘Magical realism, the literature of postcolonial nations, is a literature of loss, of lament for pure origins that can never be recovered, and loss is something Flanagan captures brilliantly.'—
The Australian's Review of Books

‘
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
is an intensely disturbing book … and yet in the moral tale played out in the novel there is some hope … the novel is haunting.'—
Australian Book Review

‘Richly imagined … told in a voice rarely heard in Australia: almost violently masculine, shot through with heartbreaking delicacy of feeling.'—Robert Dessaix

‘Flanagan's absorbing and at times deeply touching second novel seems certain to make a large mark.'—
Who Weekly

‘A masterpiece of storytelling.'—
Mercury

‘The novel that moved me to tears this year … When I read the manuscript on a plane, I had to reassure the man next to me that it was not that my life was a mess, it was just that the book was so poignant.'—Caroline Baum,
The Sydney Morning Herald

‘He has the capacity to give voice to wordless passions, primal voices that whisper and echo through memory. Tasmania reverberates throughout
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
like a monumental force; a character in its own right.'—
The Sunday Times

Gould's Book of Fish

Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer & forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish.

Once upon a time, there were miracles …

Praise for
Gould's Book of Fish

‘A masterpiece.'—
The Times

‘A brilliantly rendered work of the imagination that investigates the complex relationships among art, ordinary human life and the natural world with great intelligence and unquestionable panache … The book is full of wild hilarity, heartbreaking cruelty and suffering, and finally love, both selfless and profane … A work of significant genius.'—
Chicago Tribune

‘A seamless masterpiece.'—
The Independent on Sunday

‘I have read nothing finer than
Gould's Book of Fish
by Richard Flanagan. Lyrical and hilarious, tender and wildly angry by turns, it reimagines the grim early history of Tasmania and at the same time dazzlingly reconceives the form of the novel.'—Peter Conrad,
The Observer

‘[Flanagan's] writing has the unmistakeable shimmer of literary star quality.'—
New Statesman

‘Most good novels arrive out of some quarrel with reality – an impossible romance, tragic loss, a social broadside of satirical anger. A few great ones raise an all-out war cry and trawl with abandon across all the familiar categories of fictional invention.
Gould's Book of Fish
… is just such a great book, by turns bawdy and pensive, moving and abrasive, visionary and squalid, apocalyptic and confessional.'—
The Washington Post

‘One part Rabelais, one part García Márquez, one part Ned Kelly.'—
The New York Times Book Review

‘[Flanagan is] … one of the novel's most ambitious talents, one whose every book … commands our attention.'—
Los Angeles Times Book Review

‘
Gould's Book of Fish
is a novel about fish the way that
Moby Dick
is a novel about a whale or
Ulysses
is a novel about the events of a single day … a wondrous, phantasmagorical meditation on art and history and nature.'—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

‘An astonishing masterpiece that challenges, provokes, and entertains at every turn.'—
Star Tribune

‘This remarkable novel is a meditation on colonialism – indeed, on history itself – couched in the story of an English guttersnipe … Flanagan also supplies one of the most profound sex scenes in recent literature … A serene, chilling vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, “swimming in vast coldness, alone”.'—
The New Yorker

‘A work of pure brilliance.'—
The Seattle Times

‘It ushers in a range of ideas that much contemporary writing grasps at but ends up simply nodding to … hugely original … There is so much to savour in this rolling, picaresque tale of grotesques and their progress: so much unfettered imagination, so much sly irony and comic anarchy. Passages burn with the intense pleasure of story-making, of the abandon that comes from a seething of ideas and their joyful mutation into words.'—
The Guardian

‘Is it a masterpiece? Halfway through my second read, I know so.'—
Good Reading

‘I became convinced that this was a truly great book that would be read by serious people long after most of the literary fiction of our time is forgotten.'—Richard Holloway,
The Herald
(Glasgow)

The Unknown Terrorist

What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country?

Gina Davies is about to find out.

After spending a night with an attractive stranger, she has become a prime suspect in the investigation of an attempted terrorist attack. When police find three unexploded bombs at a stadium and her mysterious lover suddenly goes missing, Gina goes on the run and witnesses every truth of her life twisted into a betrayal.

The Unknown Terrorist
is a relentless tour de force that paints a devastating picture of a contemporary society gone haywire, where the ceaseless drumbeat of terror-alert levels, newsbreaks and fear of the unknown pushes one woman ever closer to breaking point.

Praise for
The Unknown Terrorist

‘Stunning … an armature for a brilliant meditation on the post-9/11 world … it does a dazzling job of limning its subject, conjuring up the postmodern, post-sci-fi world of globalised terror and trade … [Flanagan's] written a book that deserves to win him the sort of readership enjoyed by two much better-known novelists with whom he has much in common: Don DeLillo and Martin Amis.'—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

‘Anyone can do grandeur, but it takes a special literary skill to make squalor grand … [Flanagan] aspires to transmute the dangerous lunacy of today into art … Brilliantly Flanaganian at moments … Here is the vitally vicious Flanagan who can stop a reader's breath.'—Melvin Jules Bukiet,
Los Angeles Times

‘Australia's sun-kissed streets become as sweaty and oppressive as the Algerian beach in Camus'
The Stranger
.'—
Entertainment Weekly

‘A beginning so brilliant it suggests [Flanagan] could be the next John le Carré if he makes his shift to pulp fiction permanent … The writing has the pizzazz you'd expect from the award-laden author of
Gould's Book of Fish
, and the political and social satire is incisive.'—
The Sunday Times

‘Like
Showgirls
written by Don DeLillo instead of Joe Eszterhas.'—Matt Thorne,
Literary Review

‘Flanagan's tightly crafted narrative is akin to the oppressive power of Kafka's
Trial
, or Capote's
In Cold Blood
, stark realism revealing underlying sickness.'—David Masiel,
The Washington Post

‘A tightly riveted, almost classic thriller … This is a damn good story delivered with the glittering prose that only the rage of just moral anger can achieve.'—
The Times

‘Nothing short of brilliance. Read this novel now, before it's too late for any of us to understand its message.'—
Scotland on Sunday

‘The fast-paced narrative builds to a fittingly bloody crescendo, and Flanagan drops astutely cynical observations along the way … A true page-turner as well as a timely, pithy critique of celebrity culture and the politics of fear-mongering.'—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

‘Flanagan's writing is a brilliant reflection of Gina's world. Full of steamy sex, drugs and violence, with a touch of high-status voyeurism, packaged into short chapters perfect for readers with limited attention spans,
The Unknown Terrorist
mocks the thriller genre even as it fulfils its expectations.'—Uzodinma Iweala,
The New York Times Review of Books

‘A funny, filmic and gripping writer, [Flanagan's] a novelist and philosopher of our time.'—
Daily Mail

‘A terrific novel, maintained at fever heat but never straying beyond the bounds of possible or even the likely.'—James Buchan,
The Guardian

‘Captivating … A masterpiece in craft and structure. Convincing as both thriller and tragedy … Like all great stories it transports the reader to a particular place in time and space.'—Philip Kopper,
The Washington Times

‘Once in a while a thriller of genuine importance comes along, fired by passionate concern.'—Toby Clements,
The Daily Telegraph
(UK)

Wanting

1841. In the remote penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, a barefoot Aboriginal girl sits for her portrait in a red silk dress. She is Mathinna, the adopted daughter of the island's governor, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, and the subject of a grand experiment in civilisation – one that will determine whether science and reason can be imposed in place of savagery and desire.

Years pass. Sir John Franklin has disappeared, along with his crew and two ships, on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. England is horrified as reports of cannibalism filter back from search parties, no one more so than the most celebrated novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, for whom Franklin's story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own soul.

As several lives become entwined by unexpected events and tragedies,
Wanting
transforms into a novel about the ways in which desire – and its denial – shape us all.

Praise for
Wanting

‘One of the best novels of the year.'—
The Times

‘In
Wanting
, Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving, intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection in its many forms – that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care, lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love.'—
Los Angeles Times

‘What a voice! … This is the best novel I have read this year or expect to read for several more … Dickens would have applauded Flanagan's style … There can be no author more passionate or unfettered than Flanagan.'—
The Sydney Morning Herald

‘Richard Flanagan's
Wanting
reminds us that he is one of the most exciting novelists working anywhere, full stop.'—Kevin Rabalais,
The Age

‘Flanagan sets his novel in the wilds of nineteenth-century Tasmania and evokes its inhabitants with exquisite precision … Flanagan forges … an entirely unified meditation on desire, “the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs.”'—
The New Yorker

‘Flanagan is a novelist of such gifts that a recitation of his plot is only a hint of the layered pleasures of his prose, in which action and voices and dreams and hints all swirl in a blunt yet lyrical style utterly his own.'—
The Oregonian

‘[Flanagan's] prose is strong and precise, and the depiction of desire's effects is sublime.'—
Publishers Weekly

‘Acclaimed Tasmanian author Flanagan explores the pursuit and denial of desire as it affects individual lives, even history, in his fifth novel … Masterful probing of emotion with his vibrant prose.'—
Booklist

‘Flanagan skilfully combines several partially known historical events to create complex and riveting fiction … Everything dovetails beautifully … as the richly imagined multiple narrative arrives at its several sorrowful conclusions. An ingenious, thoughtful and potent demonstration of this assured author's imaginative versatility.'—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

‘Moving seamlessly through time, across two continents and between three storylines,
Wanting
is a marvel of precision and cohesion … Flanagan knows even the strongest yearning can mean nothing against the tides of fate. His beautifully bleak riffs on this universal theme make
Wanting
one of the finest novels of the year.'—
The Sun-Herald

‘In dense, poetic prose, Flanagan characterises something that exists across human experience, above and beyond historical particulars and cultural differences: “The way we are denied love. And the way we suddenly discover it being offered us, in all its pain and infinite heartbreak.”'—
The Guardian

‘A beautifully constructed fugue on desire and its denial, on the protean forms assumed by passionate natures wrestling with 19th-century dictates of reason and duty.'—
The Times Literary Supplement

‘
Wanting
is a novel you never want to end. As a reader, I can offer no greater accolade.'—
The Canberra Times