Publisher's Synopsis
'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, two-time Booker winner
Who loves longer?
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 a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die.
Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place. Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science and memory it shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
'Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is such a book. It holds a life between its covers and while you read, it holds you too. A celebration of all life, it is also a reckoning with the 20th century and what it revealed about us to ourselves. It is intimate, beautiful, unsparing and profound. It nudges at eternity, and then comes back home, to decency and love' ― Anna Funder, author of Wifedom
'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
