Question 7

Question 7 is Flanagan’s finest book. It is a treatise on the immeasurability of life, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of mono no aware, the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, and enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. In the meditative, circular story structure of memoir and history and auto-fiction, replete with nuance and sound thought, Flanagan doesn’t just present Chekhov’s ‘Question 7’ – appearing as a thread, he doesn’t just pull at it but unravels an entire tapestry. He travels to the metaphorical weaver, the shearer, the shepherd, and the hooved animal itself – and reaches into the deepest past where, he is so astute in writing, ‘there is no memory without shame’.

Tara June Winch, Guardian

Flanagan is a literary magician . . . Read this book and revel in the many ‘aha’ moments elicited by the masterful prose.

Sarah L'Estrange, ABC News

Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a profoundly moving love song for the writer’s parents, a forensic excavation, a lament, a confession, a jig-saw puzzle in which Hiroshima connects to HG Wells, and the Martians colonise Tasmania. We are all competitive, of course, so this is not an easy thing to say: but Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years.

Peter Carey, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023

Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent.

Tim Winton, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023

Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is such a book. It holds a life between its covers and while you read, it holds you too. A celebration of all life, it is also a reckoning with the 20th century and what it revealed about us to ourselves. It is intimate, beautiful, unsparing and profound. It nudges at eternity, and then comes back home, to decency and love.

Anna Funder, Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of 2023

This elegiac, chaptered essay touches on ideas that have haunted his fiction for years . . . Question 7 is Flanagan’s painful and powerful examination of the psychic implications of what it means to be alive directly because so many people died – a deeply existential conundrum that is so very personal and so very universal, that it’s hard to shake.

Sian Cain, Guardian