Description

‘Striking…brilliantly done’ The Times

An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best.

Anna’s aged mother is dying – if her three children would just allow it. Forced by their pity to stay alive, she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.

When Anna’s finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope, love and orange-bellied parrots.

‘One of our greatest living novelists’ Washington Post

Publisher Review

Pyrotechnic brilliance * Daily Mail * Ambitious, powerful... There is much to enjoy and admire in this novel... Flanagan writes with a startling brilliance * Scotsman * A fiercely well-observed account of the psychological twists and turns, the stress points and the double-binds, of familial love * Daily Telegraph * Richard Flanagan is one of the greatest writers at work in the world today - I admire him and his writing immensely. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a haunting, urgent and important book about our broken and confusing age -- James Rebanks 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 *