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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

By: Richard Flanagan
Narrated by: Essie Davis
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Brought to you by Penguin.

An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best.

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 she increasingly escapes through her hospital window 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, but 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 a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.

© Richard Flanagan 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature
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Critic reviews

Pyrotechnic brilliance
Ambitious, powerful... There is much to enjoy and admire in this novel... Flanagan writes with a startling brilliance
A fiercely well-observed account of the psychological twists and turns, the stress points and the double-binds, of familial love
Richard Flanagan is one of the greatest writers at work in the world today - I admire him and his writing immensely. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a haunting, urgent and important book about our broken and confusing age (James Rebanks)
Striking... brilliantly done... Flanagan is wise enough to place his wider concerns, and the accompanying magic realism within the sturdy framework of a conventional family narrative
Magnificent... Flanagan hasn't just written about the space between living and dying; in writing about the things that are disappearing from the world he's captured something fundamental about the moment we're living in
Pure and simple... A book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects... What impresses most, however, is that Flanagan's novel doesn't end in condemnation. It keeps searching for the proper form for love (Geordie Williamson)
Flanagan has delivered a book that both distills the literary qualities for which he has been celebrated for more than a quarter of a century and recasts our ideas about the kind of writer he is and what he can do. This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical... What an astonishing book this is (Michael Williams)
An extraordinary tour de force, utterly compelling... It's a heartfelt, urgent plea to restore our connection to the world before it's too late (Morag MacInnes)
Utterly dazzling (Jonathan Wright)
All stars
Most relevant
Magic realism or horror it is not, but a gripping fantastic-hyperbolic account of man's madness in his failure to understand the meaning of death and sanctity of love. The vibe of the terrible bushfire devestation and lack of hope regards environmental balance prevails; it gave me much hope to read the accurate and fresh observations of the decline of human reason and an opportunity to pity people trapped in their own fear and loneliness. In saying it like it is we get room to think about how to proceed on a radically new holistic front, a dire prerequisite implied by the sheer fragmentation and literal dissolution of all coherence and the failings of modern constructs of abstraction.

powerfully real and unusual

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I'm at a loss to know how anyone could extract anything positive from this grim tale, anything pleasant or enjoyable. Even that might be endured if there seemed to be some purpose in it, some hook, even, to keep you reading, but I could find none. The only reason I persisted was a determination not to let it defeat me, and perhaps a forlorn hope its ending might reverse the apparently interminable despair it maintained and invoked till then. Maybe it did, just slightly. But not enough to lift one from the gloom of the first 300 pages.

Unremittingly negative, verging on unpleasant.

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