Question 7

Question 7 is Flanagan’s finest book. It is a treatise on the immeasurability of life, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of mono no aware, the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, and enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. In the meditative, circular story structure of memoir and history and auto-fiction, replete with nuance and sound thought, Flanagan doesn’t just present Chekhov’s ‘Question 7’ – appearing as a thread, he doesn’t just pull at it but unravels an entire tapestry. He travels to the metaphorical weaver, the shearer, the shepherd, and the hooved animal itself – and reaches into the deepest past where, he is so astute in writing, ‘there is no memory without shame’.

Tara June Winch, Guardian

Flanagan is a literary magician . . . Read this book and revel in the many ‘aha’ moments elicited by the masterful prose.

Sarah L'Estrange, ABC News

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, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023

Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent.

Tim Winton, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023

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, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023

It is not often that a book forces you to put it down repeatedly because you feel shaky. Question 7 did that to me. It is that good.

James McConnachie, Sunday Times

This elegiac, chaptered essay touches on ideas that have haunted his fiction for years . . . Question 7 is Flanagan’s painful and powerful examination of the psychic implications of what it means to be alive directly because so many people died – a deeply existential conundrum that is so very personal and so very universal, that it’s hard to shake.

Sian Cain, Guardian

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is a memoir about his parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West . . . it is fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down. A masterpiece.

Mark Haddon

I was fascinated, troubled and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work: part memoir, part love letter to the place and people of Tasmania, and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of cause and effect . . . I can think of nothing else quite like it.

Sarah Perry

A brilliant, brilliant book.

James Rebanks

Question 7 is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read - and this is hardly to touch on its originality. I was amazed by its intense moral and emotional rigour, its power of compassion, the strength and beauty of the prose. I would take it up, read a page, sometimes just a paragraph, and find I had to set it down, dazed, to think about every word and idea before I could even begin to go on. Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: [Flanagan's] most momentous book yet.

Laura Cumming

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

A masterpiece of subtlety and depth.

Alex Preston, Guardian

Thoughtful and often beautiful, moving without effort between the very big and the apparently very small. Flanagan is a riveting writer.

Literary Review (UK)

A haunting, jagged, sparkling narrative puzzle in which the pieces deliberately refuse to fit.

Kirkus Reviews

Mr Flanagan is a master storyteller.

The Economist

Booker Prize winner Flanagan weaves strands about his parents, Australian history, and the atomic bomb into a mesmerizing narrative tapestry in this dazzling, one-of-a-kind memoir . . . a bracing dreamscape . . . This is masterful.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A dark masterpiece ... a book about Tasmania, about memory, about the legacy of the second world war. It is a deeply personal book that I found mesmerising.

Colm Tóibín, Best Summer Reads 2024, Guardian

I’ve loved Question 7 by Richard Flanagan – he is a writer of such extraordinary imagination and elegance. His latest book is breathtakingly good; it’s astonishing.

Peter Francopan, Best Summer Reads 2024, Guardian

Flanagan has produced a kind of philosophical fantasia, a highly original weaving together of a half-dozen essayistic narratives ... [a] book that will go on to interweave beautifully evoked memories of the author’s childhood in a poor and extended Catholic family in Tasmania with an account of how Leo Szilard, father of the atomic bomb, discovered the kernel for his speculations about nuclear chain reactions in H.G. Wells’s 1914 novel, “The World Set Free" ... [a] richly layered book ... Peter Carey ends [his review] with a surprisingly bold declaration: “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 hundred years.” That seems a tad hyperbolic but, possibly, only a tad.

Michael Dirda, Washington Post

The book’s presiding spirit is W.G. Sebald, whose memoir-like novels also move between the individual life and the deep waters of history ... What Flanagan achieves so well is locating what is intimately human within his grand sweep, whether that be a couple making love in a Swiss forest atop a newspaper, to protect themselves from pine needles, or the portraits of his parents and his maternal grandmother. The attention he pays these people is tender without ever sacrificing the sharpness of his gaze ... the writing exerts an irresistible power and carries us with it.

Chris Power, New York Times

Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 was the first book I read in 2024, and one of the most memorable I’ve read, ever. This memoir-history-philosophical musing on the nature of love, death, violence and forgiveness has a depth of inquiry and a capacious humanity that is destined to render it a classic.

Geraldine Brooks, Best Reads of 2025, Sydney Morning Herald

The book I loved most was Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 for the urgency of the tone, the sharp sense of the past and for its emotional accuracy and honesty.

Colm Toíbín, Best Reads of 2024, Sydney Morning Herald