Question 7
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Question 7
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Narrated by:
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Richard Flanagan
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By:
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Richard Flanagan
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
**WINNER of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024**
Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love 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 Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
'A work of non-fiction . . . but it has all the complexity of emotional heft of a great novel . . . Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be' Sunday Times
'There’s so much . . . in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir . . . That it is a masterpiece is without question' Observer
Critic reviews
'Question 7 is written with a spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control, care. It is a kind of reckoning, Richard Flanagan with his father and his mother, Tasmania with its past, Japan with its past, the author with himself. It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me' (Colm Tóibín)
'Flanagan’s finest book... A brilliant meditation on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence.… Flanagan explores old, razed and sacred ground... the Japanese death railway, white Australia’s Black history, the convict and settler bloodlines of fertile Tasmanian country, and the cold rapids of the mighty Franklin River.… While reading I found myself abruptly shutting the book again and again and steadying my own heart with a hand at my throat. Only the best writing is so affecting that a reader has a physical reaction... I was deeply moved.... the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy... tuned as finely as W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn' (Tara June Winch)
What listeners say about Question 7
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- K. Ward
- 15-12-24
Thought-provoking and staggeringly beautiful.
This is not like anything I’ve ever read or listened to before. It’s not a novel but a series of reflections by the author on his own and his family’s lives, intertwined with related stories of the Second World War and the history of the atom bomb. I found it completely gripping and listened to the whole thing over a weekend. It’s an extremely personal tale and having the author’s own voice on audible seems completely right - I can’t really imagine it being narrated by anyone else. A truly incredible book.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- ARW
- 19-08-24
Outstanding
Very hard to summarise! Moving and reflective weaving together of family memoir, science fiction and science. Fascinating and narrated well by the author.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Emily B
- 24-11-24
Wise, honest, full of heart.
I spent a Sunday captivated by this book. I meant to listen for an hour but I couldn't stop. While reaching out for lofty ideas in science he combines history with the deeply personal and creates something beautiful and real. As a child with an undiagnosed hearing condition he slips out of the social milieu and realises that 'as you learn that you are written upon, so you learn to read people.' This isolation affords him introspection and deep connection with his environment. After operations he returns to the social yet he is changed with sensibilities altered and heightened. Observant, smart but with two feet on the ground (and a tough past behind him) his writing is sublime. It may seem too much but today and now in some resonate, smaller way, I feel changed by this book. Thank you RF.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Chloe Alexander
- 16-08-24
An astonishing and beautiful book
Possibly the finest book I've ever read and ever had read to me. I can't begin to describe the links in Flanagan's chain reaction of narratives, but it's all mesmerisingly set out in such simple yet breathtakingly beautiful language that we are held on a journey of wonder all the way through. Cannot recommend this book highly enough and his reading of it is impeccable.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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- Chooby
- 08-08-24
An Incredible Book
This book is a rare thing, packed with truth and understanding covering horrendous misdeeds of the human race yet balanced with love.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- John D
- 29-11-24
compelling account
Clear and factual. Might have benefitted from a little more modulation from reader.
Broad ranging insights into minds of Manhattan Project key team members and also the Aboriginal viewpoint on colonisation of Tasmania.
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