Love, family and nuclear fission collide in a genre-busting return from Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan
Question 7
By Richard Flanagan
Chatto & Windus / hardback, ebook, audio / 30 May 2024
‘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, Sydney Morning Herald – ‘Best Reads of the Year’
‘Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent.’ - Tim Winton, Sydney Morning Herald – ‘Best Reads of the Year’
‘Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. Richard Flanagan’s is such a book. It holds a life between its covers and while you read, it holds you too. A celebration of all life, it is also a reckoning with the 20th century and what it revealed about us to ourselves. It is intimate, beautiful, unsparing and profound. It nudges at eternity, and then comes back home, to decency and love.’ - Anna Funder, Sydney Morning Herald – ‘Best Reads of the Year’
The summer after I died, I returned as a ghost
‘Beginning by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Richard Flanagan’s astonishing new book 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.
The title of this book takes from a riddle by Chekhov, which asks, insistently: who loves longer? Flanagan answers with a passionate song to his island home and his parents, and to the history that delivered him to his place. A hypnotic melding of memory and history, science and dream he shows, dazzlingly, how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
Memory is as much an act of creation as it is of testimony… one without the other is a tree without its trunk, wings without a bird, a book without its story.
“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.... Question 7 is Flanagan’s finest book…the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy... tuned as finely as W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn.”
Richard Flanagan has been described as ‘one of our greatest living novelists’ (Washington Post). His books have received numerous honours and are published in forty-two countries. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish. A rapid on the Franklin River is named after him.
Celebrated film director Justin Kurzel (The True History of the Kelly Gang, Macbeth) is adapting The Narrow Road to the Deep North for television. It is now in production, starring Jacob Elordi (Saltburn, Priscilla) and Ciarán Hinds (Belfast, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy).
Question 7 was published by Knopf in Australia in October 2023 and is being hailed as Flanagan’s most brilliant work yet and has been riding high in the Australian bestseller lists.
Richard Flanagan will be visiting the UK on publication and is available for interview please contact:
EMMA FINNIGAN PR
07870 210468 | emma@emmafinniganpr.co.uk | @emmafinnigan | www.emmafinniganpr.co.uk