Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
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‘Combines a rich voice, highly original, with great invention and engrossing narrative pace. A fine work of fiction. I thought it very, very good indeed.’ —Thomas Keneally
‘The sort of stunt Faulkner and Ambrose Bierce together might have concocted … a triumphant tour de force.’ —The News & Observer
‘The flow of language brilliantly stimulates Tasmania’s mighty Franklin River … A powerful and exciting odyssey that can fairly claim to be an epic.’ —The Weekend Australian
‘Like the river which runs through it, Death of a River Guide is possessed of both a fierce, seething energy and a limpid, unexpected tranquillity.’ —The Irish Times
‘If Flanagan never writes another book, he should be remembered for this one.’ —The Austin Chronicle
‘A stunning debut novel.’ —The Sunday Mail
‘There is a great sense of humanity about this book, a concern for the spirit as well as for the trials of physical existence … Uplifting and immensely rewarding.’ —Australian Book Review
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja’s mother walked into a blizzard never to return.
Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present – changing forever his living death and her ordered life …
Since its first publication in 1997, Richard Flanagan’s classic story of a migrant family has become one of the most loved literary novels in Australian history.
Praise for The Sound of One Hand Clapping
‘Heart-wrenching and beautifully written … A rare and remarkable achievement.’ —Los Angeles Times
‘Haunting and unforgettable.’ —The Canberra Times
‘From its wonderfully atmospheric opening to its touching conclusion, this is a heartbreaking story, beautifully told.’ —Literary Review
‘A story about redemptive love, a celebration of the resilience of individuals and of their power to change … deeply moving, eventually uplifting.’ —The Advertiser
‘An almost unbearably sad story … an epic tragedy conducted under the author’s microscope which requires fortitude and a man-sized box of tissues to get through … This novel is a passionately literary account of one of this country’s formative experiences.’ —The Sunday Age
‘Flanagan is an accomplished ringmaster of despair and tenderness.’ —The Globe and Mail
‘Flanagan imbues this most Australian of stories with a middle European sensibility found in the reserve of characters in Milan Kundera’s writings … Flanagan tells an immortal story of faith and hope, its loss and rebirth … The Sound of One Hand Clapping is destined to be a classic.’ —Sunday Herald Sun
‘Flanagan makes us care about his central characters and breathes life into dark pockets of history. He underscores the terror and mystery of the landscape with a strange tenderness, a loving attention to the little rituals and memories that serve both to sustain and debilitate the people he writes about.’ —The Weekend Australian
‘Magical realism, the literature of postcolonial nations, is a literature of loss, of lament for pure origins that can never be recovered, and loss is something Flanagan captures brilliantly.’ —The Australian’s Review of Books
‘The Sound of One Hand Clapping is an intensely disturbing book … and yet in the moral tale played out in the novel there is some hope … the novel is haunting.’ —Australian Book Review
‘Richly imagined … told in a voice rarely heard in Australia: almost violently masculine, shot through with heartbreaking delicacy of feeling.’ —Robert Dessaix
‘Flanagan’s absorbing and at times deeply touching second novel seems certain to make a large mark.’ —Who Weekly
‘A masterpiece of storytelling.’ —Mercury
‘The novel that moved me to tears this year … When I read the manuscript on a plane, I had to reassure the man next to me that it was not that my life was a mess, it was just that the book was so poignant.’ —Caroline Baum, The Sydney Morning Herald
‘He has the capacity to give voice to wordless passions, primal voices that whisper and echo through memory. Tasmania reverberates throughout The Sound of One Hand Clapping like a monumental force; a character in its own right.’ —The Sunday Times
The Unknown Terrorist
What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country?
Gina Davies is about to find out.
After spending a night with an attractive stranger, she has become a prime suspect in the investigation of an attempted terrorist attack. When police find three unexploded bombs at a stadium and her mysterious lover suddenly goes missing, Gina goes on the run and witnesses every truth of her life twisted into a betrayal.
The Unknown Terrorist is a relentless tour de force that paints a devastating picture of a contemporary society gone haywire, where the ceaseless drumbeat of terror-alert levels, newsbreaks and fear of the unknown pushes one woman ever closer to breaking point.
Praise for The Unknown Terrorist
‘Stunning … an armature for a brilliant meditation on the post-9/11 world … it does a dazzling job of limning its subject, conjuring up the postmodern, post-sci-fi world of globalised terror and trade … [Flanagan’s] written a book that deserves to win him the sort of readership enjoyed by two much better-known novelists with whom he has much in common: Don DeLillo and Martin Amis.’ —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
‘Anyone can do grandeur, but it takes a special literary skill to make squalor grand … [Flanagan] aspires to transmute the dangerous lunacy of today into art … Brilliantly Flanaganian at moments … Here is the vitally vicious Flanagan who can stop a reader’s breath.’ —Melvin Jules Bukiet, Los Angeles Times
‘Australia’s sun-kissed streets become as sweaty and oppressive as the Algerian beach in Camus’ The Stranger.’ —Entertainment Weekly
‘A beginning so brilliant it suggests [Flanagan] could be the next John le Carré if he makes his shift to pulp fiction permanent … The writing has the pizzazz you’d expect from the award-laden author of Gould’s Book of Fish, and the political and social satire is incisive.’ —The Sunday Times
‘Like Showgirls written by Don DeLillo instead of Joe Eszterhas.’ —Matt Thorne, Literary Review
‘Flanagan’s tightly crafted narrative is akin to the oppressive power of Kafka’s Trial, or Capote’s In Cold Blood, stark realism revealing underlying sickness.’ —David Masiel, The Washington Post
‘A tightly riveted, almost classic thriller … This is a damn good story delivered with the glittering prose that only the rage of just moral anger can achieve.’ —The Times
‘Nothing short of brilliance. Read this novel now, before it’s too late for any of us to understand its message.’ —Scotland on Sunday
‘The fast-paced narrative builds to a fittingly bloody crescendo, and Flanagan drops astutely cynical observations along the way … A true page-turner as well as a timely, pithy critique of celebrity culture and the politics of fear-mongering.’ —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘Flanagan’s writing is a brilliant reflection of Gina’s world. Full of steamy sex, drugs and violence, with a touch of high-status voyeurism, packaged into short chapters perfect for readers with limited attention spans, The Unknown Terrorist mocks the thriller genre even as it fulfils its expectations.’ —Uzodinma Iweala, The New York Times Review of Books
‘A funny, filmic and gripping writer, [Flanagan’s] a novelist and philosopher of our time.’ —Daily Mail
‘A terrific novel, maintained at fever heat but never straying beyond the bounds of possible or even the likely.’ —James Buchan, The Guardian
‘Captivating … A masterpiece in craft and structure. Convincing as both thriller and tragedy �
� Like all great stories it transports the reader to a particular place in time and space.’ —Philip Kopper, The Washington Times
‘Once in a while a thriller of genuine importance comes along, fired by passionate concern.’ —Toby Clements, The Daily Telegraph (UK)
Wanting
1841. In the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, a barefoot Aboriginal girl sits for her portrait in a red silk dress. She is Mathinna, the adopted daughter of the island’s governor, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, and the subject of a grand experiment in civilisation – one that will determine whether science and reason can be imposed in place of savagery and desire.
Years pass. Sir John Franklin has disappeared, along with his crew and two ships, on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. England is horrified as reports of cannibalism filter back from search parties, no one more so than the most celebrated novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, for whom Franklin’s story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own soul.
As several lives become entwined by unexpected events and tragedies, Wanting transforms into a novel about the ways in which desire – and its denial – shape us all.
Praise for Wanting
‘One of the best novels of the year.’ —The Times
‘In Wanting, Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving, intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection in its many forms – that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care, lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love.’ —Los Angeles Times
‘What a voice! … This is the best novel I have read this year or expect to read for several more … Dickens would have applauded Flanagan’s style … There can be no author more passionate or unfettered than Flanagan.’ —The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Richard Flanagan’s Wanting reminds us that he is one of the most exciting novelists working anywhere, full stop.’ —Kevin Rabalais, The Age
‘Flanagan sets his novel in the wilds of nineteenth-century Tasmania and evokes its inhabitants with exquisite precision … Flanagan forges … an entirely unified meditation on desire, “the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs.”’ —The New Yorker
‘Flanagan is a novelist of such gifts that a recitation of his plot is only a hint of the layered pleasures of his prose, in which action and voices and dreams and hints all swirl in a blunt yet lyrical style utterly his own.’ —The Oregonian
‘[Flanagan’s] prose is strong and precise, and the depiction of desire’s effects is sublime.’ —Publishers Weekly
‘Acclaimed Tasmanian author Flanagan explores the pursuit and denial of desire as it affects individual lives, even history, in his fifth novel … Masterful probing of emotion with his vibrant prose.’ —Booklist
‘Flanagan skilfully combines several partially known historical events to create complex and riveting fiction … Everything dovetails beautifully … as the richly imagined multiple narrative arrives at its several sorrowful conclusions. An ingenious, thoughtful and potent demonstration of this assured author’s imaginative versatility.’ —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
‘Moving seamlessly through time, across two continents and between three storylines, Wanting is a marvel of precision and cohesion … Flanagan knows even the strongest yearning can mean nothing against the tides of fate. His beautifully bleak riffs on this universal theme make Wanting one of the finest novels of the year.’ —The Sun-Herald
‘In dense, poetic prose, Flanagan characterises something that exists across human experience, above and beyond historical particulars and cultural differences: “The way we are denied love. And the way we suddenly discover it being offered us, in all its pain and infinite heartbreak.”’ —The Guardian
‘A beautifully constructed fugue on desire and its denial, on the protean forms assumed by passionate natures wrestling with 19th-century dictates of reason and duty.’ —The Times Literary Supplement
‘Wanting is a novel you never want to end. As a reader, I can offer no greater accolade.’ —The Canberra Times
And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?
‘And what do you do, Mr Faulkner?’ asked Clark Gable after being introduced to William Faulkner at a party.
‘I write,’ replied Faulkner.
‘And what do you do, Mr Gable?’
Collected here for the first time are the very best of Richard Flanagan’s wide-ranging, free-wheeling writings on everything from a near-fatal kayak trip to directing film and writing novels; from baking bread to bushfires to art to war; from refugees on the run to Jorge Luis Borges to his celebrated essay on the rape of Tasmania’s forests, credited as a key to halting Gunns’ two-billion-dollar pulp mill.
Sparkling, moving and always surprising, this is exhilarating reading from one of Australia’s finest writers.
Praise for And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?
‘Richard Flanagan examines the quotidian – and the extraordinary – in a welcome collection of his writings … Few can match his eloquence, unflinching honesty and capacity to surprise, as this potent collection attests.’ —Bron Sibree, The Courier-Mail
‘What unites all the pieces, from 1995 to 2010, is a care for the precision of words not to dazzle but to carry a strong and infectious feeling for the subject … This collection proves that at least a portion of what passes through our hands each day is worth bottling, cellaring and revisiting as it gets better with the years.’ —Malcolm Knox, The Saturday Age
‘The well-tempered prose of sweet reason. Highly recommended.’ —Ian McFarlane, The Canberra Times
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Gould's Book of Fish
Published by Random House Australia 2012
Copyright © Richard Flanagan 2001
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW, 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices
First published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited, in 2001
First published by Vintage Australia in 2012
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Flanagan, Richard, 1961-
Gould's book of fish [electronic resource] / Richard Flanagan
ISBN 9781742756110 (epub)
A823.3
The images in this book are reproduced from William Buelow Gould’s ‘Sketchbook of Fishes in Macquarie Harbour’, which is held in the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. In April 2011 the ‘Sketchbook of Fishes in Macquarie Harbour’ was inscribed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register.
Cover images: The Pot-Bellied Seahorse © Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office;
vintage paper background © Nagy Melinda/Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Gayna Murphy
Author photograph by Colin MacDougall
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