Question 7

'A memoir about [Flanagan's] parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West . . . A masterpiece’ Mark Haddon

'Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet’ Laura Cumming

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.

'Spectacular . . . It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me' Colm Tóibín