First Person

Flanagan’s best work to date.

Readings magazine

. . . a tour de force from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

The Australian Women’s Weekly

The real joy of [First Person] is the intensity of its honesty and its writing. This is a book of demonic possession, of obsession, and there’s a zinger of thought, of expression, in every paragraph.

Phillip Adams, The Australian

Undeniably fascinating . . . a real page turner.

Peter Kenneally, The Sydney Morning Herald

A smart, slippery novel . . . Electric.

Daily Mail

Scathingly funny . . . but this is also a profound and thought-provoking novel that explores the nature of truth, lies, and fiction.

The Bookseller

First Person is studded with sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life.

Financial Times

As unsettling as it is inspired.

Esquire (UK)

Flanagan has written a Kurtz for our time

Sydney Review of Books

First Person is both comic and frightening. At times I caught a glimpse of Money-era Martin Amis in Flanagan’s satirical asides on the Australian publishing industry… And there’s a hint, too, of an epochal gloom that is redolent of the The Great Gatsby. Yet there are also passages touched with the virtuosity that shone so brightly in The Narrow Road that are pure Flanagan… Studded with sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life

Financial Times

A black comedy about the unreliability of memory and the warped values of modern publishing . . . the beauty of First Person is the way it blossoms into a much richer novel than that outline scenario suggests . . . readable and thought-provoking

Mail on Sunday

The brilliance of the novel is the portrayal of [Heidl’s and Kif’s] interaction, their clashes and ultimate union . . . Flanagan is the sort of writer you wish you could be.

Otago Daily Times

The narrator of this novel is an angsty aspiring novelist who is summoned from Tasmania to Melbourne for a ghostwriting assignment. His subject, an infamous con man called Ziggy, is infuriatingly evasive. “I have been missing since I was born,” he offers by way of an origin story. As the ghostwriter contends with underworld escapades, farcical publishing-industry posturing, and his gnomic subject, he becomes obsessed with the boundary between fiction and reality. Flanagan cannot quite make Ziggy’s magnetism or sinister influence plausible, but the novel, with its switchbacking recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing.

The New Yorker