And the indigenous fauna took a devastating hit: images of charred kangaroos circulated on social media, and at least 30,000 koalas perished, with many more maimed.Īgainst this backdrop the Booker Prize-winning writer Richard Flanagan sets his gorgeous, mesmerizing new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, connecting Australia’s ecological cataclysm with the anomie of a Tasmanian family, as Francie, the eighty-six-year-old matriarch, drifts toward death in a Hobart hospital. During the summer of 2019–2020, unprecedented heat and freakish storms sparked massive wildfires that scorched millions of acres from the outback to the coasts. Just before COVID-19, Australia was burning to the ground. brilliantly done.The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan It's a heartfelt, urgent plea to restore our connection to the world before it's too late Morag MacInnes, Tablet, *Novel of the Week*Ī fiercely well-observed account of the psychological twists and turns, the stress points and the double-binds, of familial love Daily Telegraph

Flanagan writes with a startling brilliance ScotsmanĪn extraordinary tour de force, utterly compelling. There is much to enjoy and admire in this novel. What an astonishing book this is Michael Williams, Sydney Morning HeraldĪmbitious, powerful. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical. This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It keeps searching for the proper form for love Geordie Williamson, The Australianįlanagan has delivered a book that both distills the literary qualities for which he has been celebrated for more than a quarter of a century and recasts our ideas about the kind of writer he is and what he can do.

What impresses most, however, is that Flanagan's novel doesn't end in condemnation. A book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects. Flanagan hasn't just written about the space between living and dying in writing about the things that are disappearing from the world he's captured something fundamental about the moment we're living in Guardian Australia

The sea of waking dreams