Question 7: The astonishing new literary memoir from the Booker-Prize winning author

'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

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,