Flanagan, Richard - Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus, 2014).epub

Hailed as a masterpiece, Richard Flanagan's epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man’s reckoning with the truth.

Set in the despair of a Japanese POW camp during the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in August 1943, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. His life is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from pitiless beatings. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.

Moving deftly from the POW camp to contemporary Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo and his comrades to those of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of love, death, and family, exploring the many forms of good and evil, war and truth, guilt and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.


Reviews

A novel of extraordinary power, deftly told and hugely affecting. A classic in the making. . . Masterful." -- Alex Preston The Observer

"Elegantly wrought, measured and without an ounce of melodrama, Flanagan's novel is nothing short of a masterpiece." -- Financial Times

"The poetry in this novel isn't just by Japanese poets. It is in the prose: strong, muscular, rhythmic, sometimes biblical in its resonances, and charged with a hypnotic power . . . devastatingly beautiful." -- Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times

"Nothing could have prepared us for this immense achievement. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is beyond comparison. . . Intensely moving." -- The Australian

"Utterly convincing . . . [An] examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh, and, above all, of how it is to live after survival. . . To say Flanagan creates a rich tapestry is to overly praise tapestries." -- Thomas Keneally, Guardian