Question 7

One of the first books I reviewed for this newsletter was Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which soon after won the Booker Prize and remains one of the best books I've read in the last decade. Somewhat inexplicably, I've hardly read him since, but his new book must have been what I was waiting for: it's every bit as good. A memoir (if you can call it that) rather than a novel, it returns to the same source as The Narrow Road (his father's harrowing time as a Japanese prisoner during World War II), but in this book that memory, beginning with the moral question of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima (which Flanagan is sure saved his father's life), sets off a chain reaction of its own, from H.G. Wells to physicist Leo Szilard to the near-destruction of Aboriginal Tasmania (Flanagan's home) to his own near-death experience in his 20s. It's a book of deep seriousness worn lightly, and one worthy of a lifetime's thought and experience.