First Person

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The audiobook edition of First Person by Richard Flanagan, read by David James.

Six weeks to write for your life... In this blistering story of a ghostwriter haunted by his demonic subject, the Man Booker Prize winner turns to lies, crime and literature with devastating effect

Young and penniless, Kif Kehlmann, is rung in the middle of the night by notorious con man and corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl proposes a deal: $10,000 for Kehlmann to ghostwrite his memoir in six weeks.

Kehlmann accepts but soon begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. Is he ghostwriting a memoir, or is Heidl is rewriting him? As the deadline draws closer everything that is certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder: who is Ziggy Heidl - and who is Kif Kehlmann?

© Richard Flanagan 2017 (P) Penguin Audio 2017

Critics Review

First Person is both comic and frightening. At times I caught a glimpse of Money-era Martin Amis in Flanagan’s satirical asides on the Australian publishing industry… And there’s a hint, too, of an epochal gloom that is redolent of the The Great Gatsby. Yet there are also passages touched with the virtuosity that shone so brightly in The Narrow Road that are pure Flanagan… Studded with sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life
Financial Times
The novel, with its switch backing recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing
The New Yorker
Perhaps the most prodigal account of writer’s block ever written… Despite some sprightly satirical sallies, mostly about publishing, First Person is a serious treatment of important modern issues (corporate corruption, exploitation of trust, the impudent dismissal of truth)
Sunday Times
A black comedy about the unreliability of memory and the warped values of modern publishing... the beauty of First Person is the way it blossoms into a much richer novel than that outline scenario suggests.... readable and thought-provoking
Mail on Sunday
A dark, occasionally demented book, that is as unsettling as it is inspired
Esquire UK
Electric tension... a smart, slippery novel pitched between book-world satire, psychological thriller and state-of-Australia analysis
Daily Mail
There’s some wonderful writing about Tasmania and the wild kayaking exploits which the narrator and Ray enjoyed, at the risk of their lives, in their youth. There is some very fine descriptive writing and narrative passages that go with a swing. There’s the sadness of lives gone wrong or torn apart, the desolation that is the consequence of family break-up. Yet the strength of the novel rests in its mordant intelligence, in its recognition that the world today is essentially Ziggy’s, one of make-believe and denial… Absorbing
Scotsman
Richard Flanagan is an ardent voice
Irish Times
The real joy of [First Person] is the intensity of its honesty and its writing. This is a book of demonic possession, of obsession, and there’s a zinger of thought, of expression, in every paragraph.
The Australian
Flanagan is scathingly funny about the world of publishing as seen from the point of view of an unpublished writer, but this is also a profound and thought-provoking novel that explores the nature of truth, lies and fiction
Bookseller

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