Book of the Week: QUESTION 7 by Richard Flanagan

Question 7 is a masterful exploration of love, history, and the interconnectedness of human lives. Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, the book navigates the choices we make about love and the profound chain reactions that follow. This hypnotic work is both a love song to Flanagan's island home and a tribute to his parents. Exploring the idea that reality is never shaped by realists and that our lives often emerge from the stories of others and the narratives we create about ourselves.

Question 7 defies labels. It’s a memoir, a family history, a sweeping view of salient events, and, when paired with philosophical reflections, inventive imaginings, and a brilliant writer’s questing curiosity, the result is profoundly moving and in the words of Colm Toibin, Mark Haddon and The Observer— a masterpiece!

“Once I had the idea of writing the book as a chain reaction that begins with Rebecca West kissing HG Wells and leads to 100,000 people dying in Hiroshima, my father living and me being born – once I understood that without that kiss, there would be no bomb and no me – then disparate things that had haunted me for so long fell into place. I thought much about my parents who, in a world they knew to be meaningless, nevertheless asserted an idea of love as their answer to the horrors out of which my island home is torn.”

Find out more:

VOLUME BooksBook of the week