Question 7

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.
**WINNER of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024**
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.

At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

'A work of non-fiction . . . but it has all the complexity of emotional heft of a great novel . . . Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be' Sunday Times

'There’s so much . . . in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir . . . That it is a masterpiece is without question' Observer

©2024 Richard Flanagan (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

'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, author of One Day
A work of non-fiction…but it has all the complexity of emotional heft of a great novel… Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be
Sunday Times
'Irresistible. . . . What Flanagan achieves so well is locating what is intimately human within his grand sweep. . . . The attention he pays is tender without ever sacrificing the sharpness of his gaze'
Chris Power, New York Times Book Review
‘Question 7 is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read - and this is hardly to touch on its originality. I was amazed by its intense moral and emotional rigour, its power of compassion, the strength and beauty of the prose. I would take it up, read a page, sometimes just a paragraph, and find I had to set it down, dazed, to think about every word and idea before I could even begin to go on. Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet’
Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap
'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
There’s so much…in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir… That it is a masterpiece is without question
Observer
'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
Excellent…Flanagan is unfailingly good company
Daily Mail
'Richard Flanagan’s 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, author of True History of The Kelly Gang
Flanagan’s portrayal of his quiet, brave father and his loving, resilient mother is exquisite. His evocation of the texture of life in rural Tas­mania is masterful… Flanagan is unfailingly good company
Daily Telegraph, 4* review

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