Author(s): Richard Flanagan

Fiction | Avenue Staff Picks

A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love. August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost. 'Beyond comparison ...an immense achievement ...Wilfred Owen wrote of his Great War verse: "My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity." Flanagan's triumph is to find poetry without any pity at all.' - Geordie Williamson, The Australian 'A story of war and star-crossed lovers, the novel is also a profound meditation on life and time, memory and forgetting ...a magnificent achievement.' - Katharine England, Adelaide Advertiser 'A masterpiece ...The Narrow Road is an extraordinary piece of writing and a high point in an already distinguished career.' - Michael Williams, The Guardian