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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
- Author
- Richard Flanagan
- Narrator
- Essie Davis
- Publisher
- Random House
- Publish Date
- 14 January 2021
- Run Time
- 7 hours 3 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best.
In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying-if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.
When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.
© Richard Flanagan 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Critics Review
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Pyrotechnic brilliance
Daily Mail
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Ambitious, powerful... There is much to enjoy and admire in this novel... Flanagan writes with a startling brilliance
Scotsman
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A fiercely well-observed account of the psychological twists and turns, the stress points and the double-binds, of familial love
Daily Telegraph
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Richard Flanagan is one of the greatest writers at work in the world today - I admire him and his writing immensely. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a haunting, urgent and important book about our broken and confusing age
James Rebanks
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Striking... brilliantly done... Flanagan is wise enough to place his wider concerns, and the accompanying magic realism within the sturdy framework of a conventional family narrative
The Times
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Magnificent... Flanagan hasn't just written about the space between living and dying; in writing about the things that are disappearing from the world he's captured something fundamental about the moment we're living in
Guardian Australia
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Pure and simple... A book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects... What impresses most, however, is that Flanagan's novel doesn't end in condemnation. It keeps searching for the proper form for love
The Australian
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Flanagan has delivered a book that both distills the literary qualities for which he has been celebrated for more than a quarter of a century and recasts our ideas about the kind of writer he is and what he can do. This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical... What an astonishing book this is
Sydney Morning Herald
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An extraordinary tour de force, utterly compelling... It's a heartfelt, urgent plea to restore our connection to the world before it's too late
Tablet, *Novel of the Week*
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Utterly dazzling
SFX
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Richard Flanagan
- Narrator
- Essie Davis
- Duration
- 7 hours 3 minutes
- Release Date
- 14 January 2021
- ISBN
- 9781473593749
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Random House
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Narrative theme: environmental issues / the natural world, Family life fiction / Stories about family, Climate change
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin. An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best. In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying-if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.© Richard Flanagan 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
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