Question 7

By: Richard Flanagan

Narrated by: Richard Flanagan

Brought to you by Penguin.

**WINNER of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024**

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.

'A work of non-fiction . . . but it has all the complexity of emotional heft of a great novel . . . Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be' Sunday Times

'There’s so much . . . in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir . . . That it is a masterpiece is without question' Observer

©2024 Richard Flanagan (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'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)

'It’s a big call to make for a Booker winner, but Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet. This elegiac, chaptered essay touches on ideas that have haunted his fiction for years: his father was a PoW in Japan for three years during the second world war and was freed after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands died – but because of that event, 16 years later Flanagan would be born in Tasmania. Question 7 is Flanagan’s painful and powerful examination of the psychic implications of what it means to be alive directly because so many people died – a deeply existential conundrum that is so very personal and so very universal, that it’s hard to shake' (Sian Cain)

'Flanagan’s finest book... A brilliant meditation on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence.… Flanagan explores old, razed and sacred ground... the Japanese death railway, white Australia’s Black history, the convict and settler bloodlines of fertile Tasmanian country, and the cold rapids of the mighty Franklin River.… While reading I found myself abruptly shutting the book again and again and steadying my own heart with a hand at my throat. Only the best writing is so affecting that a reader has a physical reaction... I was deeply moved.... the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy... tuned as finely as W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn' (Tara June Winch)