Richard Flanagan Livres

Lorsque Sid Hammet, faussaire australien, trouve dans une brocante le livre des poissons écrit par le peintre forçat William Buelow Gould, il ne peut se douter de l'influence que vont avoir sur lui ces douze gravures de poissons et le texte chaotique qui les accompagne. Car l'ouvrage ne se contente pas de raconter la destinée de la colonie pénitentiaire de l'île Sarah qui, sous l'influence de son Napoléon des antipodes, a brièvement rêvé de devenir une nouvelle Europe avant de sombrer au milieu des flammes. Gould, forçat devenu prophète, a en effet compris que le monde entier était contenu dans un poisson ! Alors que la révolte gronde et peut à chaque instant basculer dans l'horreur, alors que l'amour transcende toutes les barrières entre le maître et l'esclave, c'est à un véritable roman des fondations que nous invite Richard Flanagan. Le livre de Gould est plus qu'un roman : pour reprendre les mots même de son auteur, " le monde n'existait plus pour devenir un livre. Un livre existait désormais avec l'ambition obscène de devenir le monde. " Le Livre de Gould est un livre prodigieux, un défi littéraire écrit avec la gourmandise d'un Rabelais, l'humour d'un Laurence Sterne et la noirceur d'un Conrad quand il s'agit de sonder au plus profond l'inconscient de tout un peuple "élevé clans une prison devenue une nation ". " Rares sont les chefs-d'œuvre qui, véritables déclarations de guerre, transcendent les frontières traditionnelles imposées à la fiction. Mais Le Livre de Gould, tour à tour paillard et réfléchi, émouvant et caustique, glauque et visionnaire, est de ceux-là. " Washington Post " L'incroyable talent de Flanagan, son imagination et sa capacité à transmettre l'écho rabelaisien des plus grands auteurs picaresques rendent cet ouvrage mémorable et même - disons le mot - extraordinaire. " Los Angeles Times

Connaissez-vous la Tasmanie, cette île du bout du monde, distante de la France de quelque dix-sept mille kilomètres ? Une terre montagneuse et sauvage, abritée au nord par le continent australien. Les hivers y sont rudes, et la tempête faisait rage en cette nuit de 1954 où Maria Buloh s'est enfoncée dans la forêt, abandonnant son mari et sa fille de trois ans. Mystère inaugural qui hante chaque page de ce récit, tout comme il hante les rêves de Sonja Buloh, cette fillette qui a vu sa mère s'éloigner sous la neige. Trente-cinq ans plus tard, Sonja, enceinte, revient sur les lieux de son enfance et tente de rassembler les morceaux épars de son histoire familiale. " Conte de l'exil, (re) conquête d'une identité perdue, voici un roman bouleversant, où les souvenirs reviennent comme ces vents qui balaient la terre et les êtres. " Alexis Lorca, Lire

Is Tasmanian salmon one big lie? In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world's best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine conditions. What could be more appealing than the idea of Atlantic salmon sustainably harvested in some of the world's purest waters? But what are we eating when we eat Tasmanian salmon? Richard Flanagan's expose of the salmon farming industry in Tasmania is chilling. In the way that Rachel Carson took on the pesticide industry in her ground-breaking book Silent Spring, Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing. From the burning forests of the Amazon to the petrochemicals you aren't told about to the endangered species being pushed to extinction you don't know about; from synthetically pink-dyed flesh to seal bombs . . . If you care about what you eat, if you care about the environment, this is a book you need to read. Toxic is set to become a landmark book of the twenty-first century.

'Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan's greatest yet' Guardian 'A masterpiece' Mark Haddon This is a book about the choices we make and the chain reaction that follows . . . By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair, through 1930s nuclear physics, to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die. Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place. Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science, and memory, Question 7 shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves. 'I was fascinated, troubled, and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work... I can think of nothing else quite like it' Sarah Perry 'Mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet' Laura Cumming 'Spectacular . . . It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me' Colm Tóibín

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, 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. Hailed as a masterpiece, Richard Flanagan’s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man’s reckoning with the truth.

THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014'S MAGNIFICENT FIRST NOVEL Beneath a waterfall on the Franklin, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, lies drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. In the rainforest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped bare of their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking. As the river rises his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of the past Aljaz discovers the soul of his country.

The book explores the paradox of modern non-freedom, juxtaposing traditional images of oppression with contemporary consumerism. It critiques how the allure of technology and consumer goods, like iPads and iPhones, shapes perceptions of worth and happiness in the Western world. The narrative delves into the unsettling realities behind these products, including ethical concerns and the commodification of beauty, prompting readers to reconsider the true cost of their desires in a society increasingly defined by materialism.

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, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she instead turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes 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, yet 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 an eerily beautiful story of grief and possibility, of loss and love and orange-bellied parrots. Hailed on publication in Australia as Flanagan's greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm illuminating what remains to us when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope

Sonja Buloh was three years old in 1954 and her father drinking too much when her mother walked into a blizzard never to return. Thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunken father, the shadows of their immigrant past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present so changing his living death and her ordered life.