Penguin Random House Australia to publish 'Question 7' by Richard Flanagan

Nikki Christer, Publisher at Large at PRH, will publish Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 in Australia and New Zealand in November 2023.

Question 7 is an extraordinary work, melding fiction and nonfiction, beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending with a river in Tasmania. It 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 genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.

At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is a haunting journey into the unexpected ways in which our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

Flanagan’s publisher of twenty-five years, Nikki Christer said: ‘A new work from Richard is always a surprise and a delight. That rare writer from whom we have come to expect the unexpected, Question 7 fascinates in its originality, and its blending of history, biography and “auto-fiction” makes it Richard’s most personal book yet. I have never read anything like it before. It is an intensely emotional and beautiful book.’

Richard Flanagan said: ‘I wanted to celebrate life and feel that the choice that presented itself to so many of us during Covid was how to live and why to even bother at all. This book was my attempt at an answer. I wanted to write about kindness and beauty and love, small things but finally the only things that matter.’

Richard Flanagan's novels have received numerous honours and are published in forty-two countries. He won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish. A rapid on the Franklin River is named after him.