Works by
Richard Flanagan
(Writer)
[1961 - ]

Fiction

• Death of a River Guide (1994) -- Winner 1996 National Fiction Award, Winner 1995 Victorian Premier's Award for First Fiction
  Beneath a waterfall on a remote Tasmanian mountain river, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, is drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. He sees his father Harry, burying his own father Boy, under a tree that bursts into flowers in midwinter every year after. He sees Boy himself as a young man, working on the river; and his Auntie Ellie, on her way to fetch the doctor for her sick grandchild, chased by a cow she believes is a Werowa spirit. In the rain-forest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped of their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking, where the branches of his story connect to family stories that are Aboriginal, Celtic, Italian, English, Chinese, and East European; stories that ground him in the land. As the river rises his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of the past Aljaz discovers the soul history of his country. An adventure tale that transforms into a spiritual odyssey, by turns earthy, dreaming, comic, tragic, vulgar, and moving, Death of a River Guide is a beautiful, haunting story by one of the world's most exciting young writers.

• The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) -- Winner 1998 Victorian Premier's Prize for Best Novel, Winner 1999 ABA Australian Book of the Year Prize
  In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, three-year-old Sonja Buloh lived with her Slovenian immigrant parents. One night, Sonja's mother Maria walked off into a blizzard, never to return-leaving Sonja with a father who drinks too much to quiet the ghosts of World War II. Thirty-five years later, Sonja has returned to Tasmania to make peace with a past that intrudes ever more forcefully into her present. As their story unfolds, it will transform forever Sonja's guarded, empty existence and her father's living death. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the rough lives of laborers in a young country; about the barbarism of the old world left behind; about people apparently without hope, seeking redemption and healing through love.
  Movie

• Gould's Book of Fish, A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001) -- Winner 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize
  Published in hardcover to outstanding acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, Gould's Book of Fish is a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia -- a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish. Widely hailed as a masterpiece and a work of genius, it stands out as one of the best novels of recent years. Billy Gould was a forger and thief sentenced to life imprisonment in a penal colony in Van Diemen's Land -- now Tasmania. After six months he escaped and boarded a whaler for the Americas, but before long his adventures landed him back in prison. The prison doctor Lempriere utilizes Gould's painting talents to create an illustrated taxonomy of the country's exotic sea creatures, which Lempriere madly believes will assure his place in history and the Royal Society. Lost and re-created, destroyed and hidden, Gould's book finally resurfaces in the present day littered with scrawls recording his unutterably strange life -- part freewheeling picaresque, part tragicomedy -- and that of his country, a penal colony, settlement, and magical space populated by generals, visionaries, and madmen. Gould's Book of Fish is a tour de force that questions the reliability of history and science, and the substance of artistic creation.

• The Unknown Terrorist (2006)
  Rriveting portrayal of a society driven by fear. What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country? Gina Davies is about to find out when, after a night spent with an attractive stranger, she becomes a prime suspect in the investigation of an attempted terrorist attack. In The Unknown Terrorist, one of the most brilliant writers working in the English language today turns his attention to the most timely of subjects — what our leaders tell us about the threats against us, and how we cope with living in fear. Chilling, impossible to put down, and all too familiar, The Unknown Terrorist is a relentless tour de force that paints a devastating picture of a contemporary society gone haywire, where the ceaseless drumbeat of terror alert levels, newsbreaks, and fear of the unknown pushes a nation ever closer to the breaking point.

Non-fiction

• Codename Iago: The Story of John Friedrich (1991) with John Friedrich
  The intriguing story of John Friedrich former chief executive of the Victorian NSCA during the 1980's. and his subsequent fall from grace. John Friedrich was arrested in April 1989 after having borrowed vast sums of money from Australian banks. He was later described as Australia's greatest conman when it was discovered that he had faked career qualifications and was living in Australia under a false passport. On July 23, 1991 he appeared in court to face 91 fraud related charges involving over AUD$293 million. On July 27, 1991, he was found dead on his farm near Sale, Victoria with a single gunshot wound to his head. His death was ruled a suicide. This book was completed after his death. Many mysteries remain about John Friedrich. Why the Australian authorities, did not make the appropriate efforts to clarify his identity, has never been explained. "Some people have power, others are allowed to execise it" one of his own quotes from the book. A man of mystery that got caught up in the power thrust upon him but also a deeply family man, a worthwhile read..