Why we like it - This is a peculiar book, hard to define, biography, history, novelistic is parts. Overall it is an excellently written meditation on stories, connections, chance, and many other fascinating threads of thought from the mind of Richard Flanagan. This book covers so much ground that its always interesting and often surprising. It gives the impression of having taken many years to write, searching for the answer to the question - who loves longer?

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, Question 7 shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves