Question 7

''A work of non-fiction . . . but it has all the complexity of emotional heft of a great novel . . . Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be'' Sunday Times

''There¿s so much . . . in Flanagan¿s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir . . . That it is a masterpiece is without question'' Observer

This is a book about the choices we make 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 daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die.

Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place.

Through a hypnotic melding of drea