Novels
His first novel, Death of a River Guide (1997), is the tale of Aljaz Cosini, river guide, who lies drowning, reliving his life and the lives of his family and forebears. It was described by "The Times Literary Supplement" as ‘one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing’. His next book, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998), which tells the story of Slovenian immigrants, was a major bestseller, selling more than 150,000 copies in Australia alone. Flanagan’s first two novels, declared Kirkus Reviews, ‘rank with the finest fiction out of Australia since the heyday of Patrick White’. Gould's Book of Fish (2001), Flanagan’s third novel, is based on the life of William Buelow Gould, a convict artist, and tells the tale of his love affair with a young black woman in 1828. It went on to win the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Flanagan has described these early novels as 'soul histories'. Flanagan’s fourth novel was The Unknown Terrorist (2006), which "The New York Times" called ‘stunning . . . a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world’. His fifth novel, Wanting (2008) tells two parallel stories: about the novelist Charles Dickens in England, and Mathinna, an Aboriginal orphan adopted by Sir John Franklin, the colonial governor of Van Diemen's Land, and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin. As well as being a New Yorker Book of the Year and Observer Book of the Year, it won the Queensland Premier's Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Prize and the Tasmania Book Prize.
His most recent book is a collection of non-fiction, And What Do You Do, Mr Gable? (2011).
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Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev’s novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his—that character’s—absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist’s dummy of the socialistic type.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)