- Published: 31 October 2023
- ISBN: 9781761343476
- Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia Audio
- Format: Audio Download
- Length: 7 hr 48 min
- Narrator: Richard Flanagan
- RRP: $36.99
Question 7
- Published: 31 October 2023
- ISBN: 9781761343476
- Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia Audio
- Format: Audio Download
- Length: 7 hr 48 min
- Narrator: Richard Flanagan
- RRP: $36.99
Question 7 is Flanagan’s finest book. It is a treatise on the immeasurability of life, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of mono no aware, the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, and enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. In the meditative, circular story structure of memoir and history and auto-fiction, replete with nuance and sound thought, Flanagan doesn’t just present Chekhov’s ‘Question 7’ – appearing as a thread, he doesn’t just pull at it but unravels an entire tapestry. He travels to the metaphorical weaver, the shearer, the shepherd, and the hooved animal itself – and reaches into the deepest past where, he is so astute in writing, ‘there is no memory without shame’.
Tara June Winch, Guardian
Flanagan is a literary magician . . . Read this book and revel in the many ‘aha’ moments elicited by the masterful prose.
Sarah L'Estrange, ABC News
Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a profoundly moving love song for the writer’s parents, a forensic excavation, a lament, a confession, a jig-saw puzzle in which Hiroshima connects to HG Wells, and the Martians colonise Tasmania. We are all competitive, of course, so this is not an easy thing to say: but Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years.
Peter Carey, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023
Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent.
Tim Winton, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023
Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is such a book. It holds a life between its covers and while you read, it holds you too. A celebration of all life, it is also a reckoning with the 20th century and what it revealed about us to ourselves. It is intimate, beautiful, unsparing and profound. It nudges at eternity, and then comes back home, to decency and love.
Anna Funder, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023
This elegiac, chaptered essay touches on ideas that have haunted his fiction for years . . . Question 7 is Flanagan’s painful and powerful examination of the psychic implications of what it means to be alive directly because so many people died – a deeply existential conundrum that is so very personal and so very universal, that it’s hard to shake.
Sian Cain, Guardian
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is a memoir about his parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West . . . it is fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down. A masterpiece.
Mark Haddon
I was fascinated, troubled and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work: part memoir, part love letter to the place and people of Tasmania, and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of cause and effect . . . I can think of nothing else quite like it.
Sarah Perry
Question 7 is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read - and this is hardly to touch on its originality. I was amazed by its intense moral and emotional rigour, its power of compassion, the strength and beauty of the prose. I would take it up, read a page, sometimes just a paragraph, and find I had to set it down, dazed, to think about every word and idea before I could even begin to go on. Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: [Flanagan's] most momentous book yet.
Laura Cumming, Observer
Question 7 is written with a spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control, care. It is a kind of reckoning, Richard Flanagan with his father and his mother, Tasmania with its past, Japan with its past, the author with himself. It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me.
Colm Tóibín
A brilliant, brilliant book.
James Rebanks
Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a profoundly moving love song for the writer’s parents, a forensic excavation, a lament, a confession, a jig-saw puzzle in which Hiroshima connects to HG Wells, and the Martians colonise Tasmania. We are all competitive, of course, so this is not an easy thing to say: but Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years.
Peter Carey, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023
Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent.
Tim Winton, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023
Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is such a book. It holds a life between its covers and while you read, it holds you too. A celebration of all life, it is also a reckoning with the 20th century and what it revealed about us to ourselves. It is intimate, beautiful, unsparing and profound. It nudges at eternity, and then comes back home, to decency and love.
Anna Funder, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023