Question 7

Richard Flanagan

Who loves longer?

Beginning at a love hotel by Japans 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 Wests 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 a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die.

Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place. Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science and memory it shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

First published:: 30/05/2024
Published by:: Vintage, Chatto & Windus
Length:: Hardcover 266 pages

See more from the 2024 prize year

What the judges said
"Unique and brilliant, this soulful book reverberates long after reading. Richard Flanagan’s writing talent is something almost other-worldly"

About the author

Richard Flanagan has been described by the Washington Post as one of our greatest living novelists and as among the most versatile writers in the English language by the New York Review of Books. He won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould's Book of Fish.