Question 7

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 genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan, as a young man, finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing whether he will live or die.

At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place, and memory shows how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.