This is the story of an Australian surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, a POW in a Japanese camp during World War II, working on the Thai-Burma railway. It moves backwards and forwards in time as we learn of his life, his great love and the lives of his fellows, both captors and POWs. It’s a bit confusing to start with but stick with it for it is a most magnificent, horrific, masterful book on the period. The wartime atrocities are horrendous. Dorrigo is sustained by the memory of an affair he had just before the war. We move on to life after the war where Dorrigo needs a string of mistresses to block out the horror. He is seen as a hero; he doesn’t feel like one. This is not an easy read; it’s tough on the stomach but it is both impressive, disturbing and important...'.
This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.
*WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014*
'An unforgettable story of men at war' The Times
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.
A masterpiece ... an extraordinary piece of writing -- Michael Williams Guardian (Australia)
I loved this book. Not just a great novel but an important book in its ability to look at terrible things and create something beautiful. Everyone should read it. -- Evie Wyld a Granta Best of Young British Novelist
A huge novel, ambitious, driven, multi-stranded ... The novel's characters, Australian and Japanese, shimmer with life; they are familiar yet finally unknowable, compromised, betrayed, fallible and credible ... A grand, paradoxical dance that is both macabre and life affirming. - Sydney Morning Herald
Author
About Richard Flanagan
Born in Tasmania in 1961, Richard Flanagan is one of Australia's leading novelists. His novels, Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize), The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting have received numerous honours and been published in 26 countries. His father, who died the day Flanagan finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway.
