The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

Magnificent... Flanagan hasn't just written about the space between living and dying; in writing about the things that are disappearing from the world he's captured something fundamental about the moment we're living in

Guardian Australia

Pure and simple... A book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects... What impresses most, however, is that Flanagan's novel doesn't end in condemnation. It keeps searching for the proper form for love

Geordie Williamson, The Australian

Flanagan has delivered a book that both distills the literary qualities for which he has been celebrated for more than a quarter of a century and recasts our ideas about the kind of writer he is and what he can do. This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical... What an astonishing book this is

Michael Williams, Sydney Morning Herald

Ambitious, powerful... There is much to enjoy and admire in this novel... Flanagan writes with a startling brilliance

Scotsman

An extraordinary tour de force, utterly compelling... It's a heartfelt, urgent plea to restore our connection to the world before it's too late

Morag MacInnes, Tablet, *Novel of the Week*

A fiercely well-observed account of the psychological twists and turns, the stress points and the double-binds, of familial love

Daily Telegraph

Striking... brilliantly done... Flanagan is wise enough to place his wider concerns, and the accompanying magic realism within the sturdy framework of a conventional family narrative

The Times

Pyrotechnic brilliance

Daily Mail

Utterly dazzling

Jonathan Wright, SFX

Fascinating

Scotland on Sunday, *Books to Look Out For 2020*

[Flanagan's] prose has a pyrotechnic brilliance

Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday

There's much beauty and hope to be found in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

Claire Webb, Radio Times