Question 7

‘This book took me completely by surprise and is unlike anything I’ve read this year. Gripping, affecting, wholly original. I absolutely loved it’ * David Nicholls, author of One Day *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 *‘Irresistible… . What Flanagan achieves so well is locating what is intimately human within his grand sweep… . The attention he pays is tender without ever sacrificing the sharpness of his gaze’ * Chris Power, New York Times Book Review *‘Question 7 is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read - and this is hardly to touch on its originality. I was amazed by its intense moral and emotional rigour, its power of compassion, the strength and beauty of the prose. I would take it up, read a page, sometimes just a paragraph, and find I had to set it down, dazed, to think about every word and idea before I could even begin to go on. Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet’ * Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap *‘We believe we make choices in our lives, yet what explodes in these pages is the way in which the fiercest and strongest response we can make to the forces that threaten to destroy us is to surrender to love’ * Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works *There’s so much…in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir… That it is a masterpiece is without question * Observer *‘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, author of Brooklyn *Excellent…Flanagan is unfailingly good company * Daily Mail *‘Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a profoundly moving love song for the writer’s parents, a forensic excavation, a lament, a confession, a jig-saw puzzle in which Hiroshima connects to HG Wells, and the Martians colonise Tasmania. We are all competitive, of course, so this is not an easy thing to say: but Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years’ * Peter Carey, author of True History of The Kelly Gang *Flanagan’s portrayal of his quiet, brave father and his loving, resilient mother is exquisite. His evocation of the texture of life in rural Tas­mania is masterful… Flanagan is unfailingly good company * Daily Telegraph, 4* review *A deeply personal book that I found mesmerising – Colm Tóibín * Guardian, Summer Reads of 2024 *‘Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a book itching to be quoted and underlined. A high-reaching philosophical enquiry that is also fully personal, it contains indelible, morally piercing moments about atrocity, inheritance, nature and the colonial experience. His section on Oxford in the 80s should be required reading at A level. I thought it was outstanding’ * Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren *A book that rejoices, and succeeds, in resisting definition… [Question 7 is] a reminder of just what a remarkable writer Richard Flanagan can be * Financial Times *‘Question 7 is a brilliant, brilliant book’ * James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral *‘I was fascinated, troubled and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work: part memoir, part love-letter to the place and people of Tasmania, and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of cause and effect… I can think of nothing else quite like it’ * Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment *

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 Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish and the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Question 7 was shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger and the Prix du meilleur livre étranger as a novel, and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is the first and only author ever to have won both the Booker and Baillie Gifford prizes.

A major television series of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is forthcoming, directed by Justin Kurzel and starring Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds.