A memoir, a collection of micro-biographies, an essay, a prose poem. . . . While immensely personal, this gorgeously unclassifiable book also covers millennia of social and natural history as it offers an elegy to our ravaged Earth. An indelible experience.” —Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust
“This book took me completely by surprise and is unlike anything I’ve read this year. Gripping, affecting, wholly original. I absolutely loved it.” ―David Nicholls, #1 bestselling author of One Day
“A soulful book [that] reverberates long after reading. Richard Flanagan’s writing talent is something almost otherworldly.” —Baillie Gifford Prize judging panel
“The writing exerts an irresistible power.” —Chris Power, New York Times Book Review
“Highly original. . . . Richard Flanagan’s brilliant Question 7 defies categorization.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“A masterpiece. . . . Fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down." —Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
“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
“It’s a big call to make for a Booker winner, but Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet. . . . So very personal and so very universal that it’s hard to shake.” —Sian Cain, The Guardian
“Breathtakingly good. . . . Flanagan is a writer of such extraordinary imagination and elegance.” —Peter Frankopan, The Guardian
“Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a book itching to be quoted and underlined. A high-reaching philosophical enquiry that is also fully personal, it contains indelible, morally piercing moments about atrocity, inheritance, nature and the colonial experience. . . . I thought it was outstanding.” ―Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren
“Extraordinary. . . . Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre can be. . . . It is not often that a book forces you to put it down repeatedly because you feel shaky. Question 7 did that to me. It is that good.” —James McConnachie, The Sunday Times
“A dazzling, one-of-a-kind memoir. . . . Masterful.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“A haunting, jagged, sparkling narrative puzzle. . . . Fascinating work.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“A beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir. . . . That it is a masterpiece is without question. Sebald himself would have been proud of the subtlety, the depth, the intensity of thought and feeling.” —Alex Preston, The Observer
“Exquisite. . . . Masterful. . . . Flanagan is unfailingly good company.” —Clement Knox, Daily Telegraph
“Thoughtful and often beautiful, moving without effort between the very big and the apparently very small. Flanagan is a riveting writer.” —Rosa Lyster, Literary Review
“Question 7 vibrates with an atomic energy of its own, barely contained. . . . interrogating the human condition with a ferocity rare in contemporary literature.” —Hamilton Cain, On the Seawall
“We believe we make choices in our lives, yet what explodes in these pages is the way in which the fiercest and strongest response we can make to the forces that threaten to destroy us is to surrender to love.” —Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works
“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, author of Brooklyn
“Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent.” —Tim Winton, Sydney Morning Herald
“Deeply affecting . . . [Flanagan is] a writer full of dazzling talents.” —Nick Duerden, i news
“Mesmerising. . . . Accompanying him on his literary quest is a transformative experience.” —Dani Garavelli, Big Issue
“Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet. . . . It is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read—and this is hardly to touch on its originality.” —Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
“This deeply moving book is his finest work. . . . [It has] the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. . . . 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.” —Tara June Winch, The Guardian Australia
“Richard Flanagan is a writer of powerful breadth with a genius for making historical connections. . . . He celebrates the anarchic imagination, the only place in which we can be truly human. . . . Question 7 may be the most perfect distillation yet of his method and his vision.” —David Mason, Hudson Review
“I was fascinated, troubled and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work: part memoir, part love-letter to the place and people of Tasmania, and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of cause and effect . . . I can think of nothing else quite like it.” —Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent
“Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. Question 7 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 twentieth 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
“How should we think about the radical experiment that is Richard Flanagan’s new book? Imagine the Tasmanian author’s body of work to date as a many-coloured coat, a shimmering patchwork of story. With Question 7 that coat is turned inside out so that the old, familiar patterns are reversed.” —Geordie Williamson, The Australian
“Is Question 7 Flanagan’s best book to date? I think it may be. It is his most intellectually complex and personally emotional work.” —Stephen Romei, The Saturday Paper
“Beautiful and suffused with love. . . . Flanagan is in total command . . . He’s at his best here: this is a thrilling read, a simultaneously expansive and precise stream of consciousness.” —Michael Williams, The Monthly
“This meditative, often beautiful, deeply introspective, and unusual book is one that only Flanagan could produce.” —Booklist
“Flanagan is a literary magician. . . . In answer to the question, ‘can fiction change the world,’ Flanagan’s answer is ‘yes’ —for good and ill. Read this book and revel in the many ‘aha’ moments elicited by the masterful prose.” —Sarah L’Estrange, ABC News Australia
“Question 7 is a brilliant, brilliant book.” —James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life
★ 2024-06-15
The noted Australian author spirals through personal and collective history searching for connections between past and present, but often distrusting those that appear.
Flanagan, author ofThe Narrow Road to the Deep North, finds the struggle to create a credible memoir troubling, since most autobiographical work must be constructed from “the lies we call time, history, reality, detail, facts.” In this distinctly nonlinear example of the form, the author pulls at threads connected to key, often traumatic events. One of these nodes is the years his father spent in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Flanagan notes that he almost certainly would have died of starvation were it not for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, leaving the author conflicted about the devastating loss suffered in Japan combined with the fact that he would never have existed without the catastrophe. He reaches back to tie the bomb to the life and work of H.G. Wells, who first conceived it in one of his lesser-known novels, and to Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who was captivated by Wells' novels and who first conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Another node is Flanagan’s shards of memory of his parents, including his mother's last words before her death at 95: “Thank you all for coming. I have had a lovely time.” A third key element of this fascinating work is Flanagan's prolonged near-death by drowning as a river guide when he was 21, to which he refers frequently throughout the book—and then at horrifying length in the final section. “Everything ever since,” he writes, “has been an astonishing dream….Perhaps this is a ghost story and the ghost me.”
A haunting, jagged, sparkling narrative puzzle in which the pieces deliberately refuse to fit.
