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Question 7

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

©2024 Richard Flanagan (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics 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

  • ‘Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is a memoir about his parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West… it is fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down. A masterpiece’

    Mark Haddon, author of The Porpoise

  • ‘Question 7 is a brilliant, brilliant book‘

    James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral

  • ‘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

  • ‘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

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