Description

FROM THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014

Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer and forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish.

Publisher Review

"A masterpiece" * The Times * "Flanagan's masterpiece" * Washington Post * "Lyrical and hilarious, tender and wildly angry by turns, it dazzlingly reconceives the form of the novel" * Observer * "Gould's Book of Fish is a novel about fish in the way that Moby-Dick is a novel about whales, Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day" * New York Times * "A vivid, voluptuous, exhilarating writer" * Sunday Telegraph * "Hugely original... Passages burn with the intense pleasure of story-making, of the abandon that comes from a seething of ideas and their joyful mutation into words" -- Alex Clark * Guardian * "A seamless masterpiece of the grotesque" * Independent on Sunday * "Outstanding" -- Robert Macfarlane * Spectator * "As beautiful to look at as it was enthralling to read" * Independent * "Hugely involving, clever, witty and tender" * Metro *