Question 7

'This book took me completely by surprise and is unlike anything I’ve read this year. Gripping, affecting, wholly original. I absolutely loved it' * David Nicholls, author of One Day *
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 *
‘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: his most momentous book yet’ * Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap *
'We believe we make choices in our lives, yet what explodes in these pages is the way in which the fiercest and strongest response we can make to the forces that threaten to destroy us is to surrender to love' * Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works *
There’s so much…in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir… That it is a masterpiece is without question * 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, author of Brooklyn *
Excellent…Flanagan is unfailingly good company * Daily Mail *
'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, author of True History of The Kelly Gang *
Flanagan’s portrayal of his quiet, brave father and his loving, resilient mother is exquisite. His evocation of the texture of life in rural Tas­mania is masterful… Flanagan is unfailingly good company * Daily Telegraph, 4* review *
A deeply personal book that I found mesmerising -- Colm Tóibín * Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2024* *
'Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is a book itching to be quoted and underlined. A high-reaching philosophical enquiry that is also fully personal, it contains indelible, morally piercing moments about atrocity, inheritance, nature and the colonial experience. His section on Oxford in the 80s should be required reading at A level. I thought it was outstanding' * Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren *
A book that rejoices, and succeeds, in resisting definition… [Question 7 is] a reminder of just what a remarkable writer Richard Flanagan can be * Financial Times *
'Question 7 is a brilliant, brilliant book' * James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral *
‘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, author of Enlightenment *
'Staggeringly good' * Keggie Carew, author of Dadland *
A writer full of dazzling talents… [Question 7 is] deeply affecting -- Nick Duerden * iPaper *
‘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, author of The Porpoise *
Words are Flanagan’s salvation: he strings them together to make mesmerising sentences… accompanying him on his literary quest is a transformative experience * Big Issue *
'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, author of Wifedom *
'Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent' * Tim Winton, author of Eyrie *
Flanagan’s finest book... A brilliant meditation on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence.… Flanagan explores old, razed and sacred ground... the Japanese death railway, white Australia’s Black history, the convict and settler bloodlines of fertile Tasmanian country, and the cold rapids of the mighty Franklin River.… While reading I found myself abruptly shutting the book again and again and steadying my own heart with a hand at my throat. Only the best writing is so affecting that a reader has a physical reaction... I was deeply moved.... the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy... tuned as finely as W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn -- Tara June Winch * Guardian (Australia) *
'It’s a big call to make for a Booker winner, but Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet. This elegiac, chaptered essay touches on ideas that have haunted his fiction for years: his father was a PoW in Japan for three years during the second world war and was freed after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands died – but because of that event, 16 years later Flanagan would be born in Tasmania. 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 (Australia) *
Thoughtful and often beautiful… Flanagan is a riveting writer… [Question 7 explores] what it means to be a thinking person with…a past that stretches as far back as you can bear to think * Literary Review *
I’ve loved Question 7 by Richard Flanagan – he is a writer of such extraordinary imagination and elegance. His latest book is breathtakingly good; it’s astonishing -- Peter Frankopan * Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2024* *
'Flanagan reads [the audiobook] with immense sensitivity and care, weighing the unfathomable moral calculus that war and violence beget, alongside truly moving vignettes of his upbringing, his relationship with his parents and their deaths. Woven in are portraits of atomic scientists, of the perpetrators of war crimes, of survivors and — unexpectedly — of the writers HG Wells and Rebecca West. At moments you can almost hear Flanagan’s astonishment at the depth of his material, and of the suffering he recounts; and yet he is such a powerful narrator that there are also moments of joy and wonder’ * Financial Times *
'Moving ... This thought-provoking book will make you re-examine your own [life]' * The Lady *
'Flanagan is a master storyteller ... A book of pithy, profound observations as well as engaging meanderings. Mr Flanagan is not afraid of the big questions, namely: What is time? What is love? What is memory? The answer to that last question helps to explain this challenging, rewarding book' * The Economist *
'Leav[es] you dizzy ... accompanying [Flanagan] on his literary quest is a transformative experience' * Big Issue *
'Thoughtful and often beautiful, moving without effort between the very big and the apparently very small. Flanagan is a riveting writer' * Literary Review *
The best book that I’ve read in the last year * BMJ *
An exceptionally powerful autobiography – at once subtle, moving and trenchant -- Andrew Motion * Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year* *
Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a spectacular advance for creative nonfiction… [a] beautiful and riveting book -- Ruth Scurr * Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year* *