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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying-if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living 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 and love and orange-bellied parrots.

© Richard Flanagan 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics 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
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
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
Sydney Morning Herald
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
Tablet, *Novel of the Week*
Utterly dazzling
SFX
Author Richard Flanagan
Narrator Essie Davis
Duration 7 hours and 3 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781473593749
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Climate change, Family life fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Environmental issues
Availability GB, IE

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