The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Review

''Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Australian author Flanagan has anticipated writing this novel much of his life, working on it for twelve years and completing it on the day his father died. His father had been a survivor of a Japanese POW camp and the brutal building of the Thai-Burma death railway, famously depicted in The Bridge on the River Kwai, as is the protagonist here. In the POW camp, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans struggles to protect his men, even as he recalls an illicit affair from the past. A letter from home changes everything, and the story is brought up to the present day. Reviews from Australia and the UK have been, not surprisingly, ecstatic.'' --Library Journal

''The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a big, magnificent novel of passion and horror and tragic irony. Its scope, its themes, and its people all seem to grow richer and deeper in significance with the progress of the story, as it moves to its extraordinary resolution. It's by far the best new novel I've read in ages.'' --Patrick McGrath, author of Constance

''I loved this book. Not just a great novel but an important book in its ability to look at terrible things and create something beautiful. Everyone should read it.'' --Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing

''A masterpiece . . . A symphony of tenderness and love, a moving and powerful story that captures the weight and breadth of a life . . . . An extraordinary piece of writing and a high point in an already distinguished career.'' --Guardian (UK)

''Nothing could have prepared us for this immense achievement . . . The Narrow Road to the Deep North is beyond comparison . . . Intensely moving.'' --Australian

''Possibly the year's most beautiful and moving novel.'' --Sunday Canberra Times

''Exhilarating . . . A huge novel, ambitious, driven, multistranded . . . [written] with mordant gusto, lyricism, and astonishing tenacity . . . With less rhetorical mannerism than Cormac McCarthy, but an equivalent ability to animate the specifics of place and time in an operatic sentence, Flanagan gives us a context, a demotic history for these men who went, hapless, to war . . . Life affirming.'' --Sydney Morning Herald

''In an already sparkling career, this might be his biggest, best, most moving work yet.'' --Sunday Age (Melbourne)

''Profound . . . It's not just the big characters but also the minor ones who strike their perfect notes.'' --Herald Sun (Melbourne)

''The luminous imagination of Richard Flanagan is among the most precious of Australian literary treasures.'' --Newcastle Herald

''Richard Flanagan is an extraordinary writer and this sixth novel is a masterpiece . . . A marvelous book.'' --Australian Women's Weekly

''Despite the novel's epic sprawl it retains the delicate vignettes that characterize Flanagan's work, those beautiful brush strokes of poignancy and veracity that remain in the reader's mind long afterwards.'' --West Australian News

''At its core it is simply about the human spirit - in all its guises. You emerge from reading Flanagan, walk out to the veranda into the sunlight, and stand there, changed.'' --Courier Mail (Brisbane)

''Pellucid, epic, and sincerely touching in its treatment of death, this is a powerful novel.'' --Publishers Weekly

''Though much of this fine novel (whose title is taken from the Japanese poet Bash ) is extraordinarily beautiful, intelligent, and sharply insightful (and even balanced - the Japanese captors are portrayed, not sympathetically, but with dimension), it is very strong and powerful medicine indeed.'' --Booklist

Product Description

From the winner of Australia's National Fiction Prize, author of the hugely acclaimed Gould's Book of Fish, comes a magisterial, Rashomon-like novel of love and war that traces the life of one man from World War II to the present.In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in 1943, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his