The Narrow Road to the Deep North

This is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014. Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not. 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. "Elegantly wrought, measured and without an ounce of melodrama, Flanagan's novel is nothing short of a masterpiece" Financial Times "The poetry in this novel isn't just by Japanese poets. It is in the prose: strong, muscular, rhythmic, sometimes biblical in its resonances, and charged with a hypnotic power... devastatingly beautiful" -- Christina Patterson The Sunday Times "Nothing could have prepared us for this immense achievement... The Narrow Road to the Deep North is beyond comparison... Intensely moving" The Australian "Utterly convincing... [an] examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh, and, above all, of how it is to live after survival... To say Flanagan creates a rich tapestry is to overly praise tapestries" -- Thomas Keneally Guardian "A journey of loss and discovery, this is a novel replete with scenes that stay with the reader long after the final page... Never sentimental or overwritten, Flanagan explores human reactions, large and small" The Economist "An unforgettable story of men at war... Flanagan's prose is richly innovative and captures perfectly the Australian demotic... He evokes Evans' affair with Amy, and his subsequent soulless wanderings, with an intensity and beauty that is as poetic as the classical Japanese literature that peppers this novel" -- Melissa Katsoulis The Times "I would be very happy if this won the Booker" -- Amanda Craig BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review "Flanagan's novel [has] grace and unfathomability... Flanagan's writing courses like a river, sometimes black with mud, sludge and corpses, sometimes bright with moonlight... The stories of these casualties of fate catch at the soul" -- Catherine Taylor Sunday Telegraph "A masterly novel... A tour de force... the love story was beautiful " -- Viv Groskop BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review "The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a big, magnificent novel of passion and horror and tragic irony. Its scope, its themes and its people all seem to grow richer and deeper in significance with the progress of the story, as it moves to its extraordinary resolution. It's by the far the best new novel I've read in ages" -- Patrick McGrath "I loved this book. Not just a great novel but an important book in its ability to look at terrible things and create something beautiful. Everyone should read it." -- Evie Wyld a Granta Best of Young British Novelist "Powerful, often brutal love story... His feel for language, history's persistent undercurrent and subtle detail sets his fiction apart. There isn't a false note in this book. He can evoke emotion without a trace of sentimentality or bathos... One of the finest novels published in English this year" -- Eileen Battersby Irish Times "Flanagan is an outstanding writer. A beauty clings to the underneath of his sentences, even when he is describing hell on earth... It's a big, difficult, absorbing and wise novel, lightly told and hard to forget" -- Claire Alfree Metro "A masterpiece ... an extraordinary piece of writing" -- Michael Williams Guardian (Australia) "A huge novel, ambitious, driven, multi-stranded ... The novel's characters, Australian and Japanese, shimmer with life; they are familiar yet finally unknowable, compromised, betrayed, fallible and credible ... A grand, paradoxical dance that is both macabre and life affirming." Sydney Morning Herald