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Question 7

Richard Flanagan

1

award won

12

score

Question 7

Question 7 won the Baillie Gifford Prize and was a Washington Post notable book of the year. Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life... By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer 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.

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Publisher
Random House
Year
2025
ISBN-13
9780593688410
Genre
Biography & Memoir
Topics
Family history and memoryAtomic bomb and HiroshimaTasmania and identity

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