Author(s): Richard Flanagan

Aust Fiction

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is an ember storm of a novel. This is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best.In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying-if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful story about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.

MATILDA BOOKSHOP REVIEW

This beautiful, brutal ember-storm of a novel is Flanagan back to his best. It follows a seemingly close-knit Tasmanian family as they unsuccessfully  try to come to terms with the increasingly poor health of their aged mother. Set against the backdrop of a world ablaze,  Living Sea..  is suffused with both sorrow and fierce anger at the irreversible decline of the world around us. Flanagan is too adroit for this to be a one-dimensional climate change book though. This is a clarion call for meaningful connections, between humans and with the natural world, to prevent the endless vanishings we choose to ignore each day. Gavin