Wanting

One of the best novels of this year

The Times

Wanting is a novel you never want to end. As a reader, I can offer no greater accolade

Canberra Times

A haunting and powerful story... Mr Flanagan does a magical job of conjuring his native Tasmania as it must have appeared to English settlers ... And he enlivens his discursive narrative with some dazzling set pieces

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

What a voice! ... Dickens would have applauded Flanagan's style. There can be no author more passionate or unfettered than Flanagan

Sydney Morning Herald

A summary does little justice to the complexities and nuances of this dense and fascinating novel ... There are moments of great power and lyricism in Wanting

William Boyd, New York Times Book Review

Flanagan brilliantly excavates historical truth with the light touch of an irresistibly good story, humour, and the wry observance that much of European civilisation depends on not dancing naked in polite drawing rooms.

Rachel Holmes, The Times

Richard Flanagan is an exemplary case in point. Through his fiction, flat, conformist portraits of individuals become rich and three-dimensional, new witnesses provide fresh testimony about the past, and Tasmania’s silences resound with voices.

New York Times Book Review

Moving seamlessly through time, across two continents and between three storylines, WANTING is a marvel of precision and cohesion.

The Sun Herald

This is the best novel I have read this year or expect to read for several more.

Stella Clarke, Sydney Morning Herald

Flanagan is a beautiful writer and Wanting is a beautiful and considered addition to his oeuvre.

The Age

As usual, Flanagan is brilliant at re-creating this "weird land predating time, with its vulgar rainbow colours, its vile, huge forests and bizarre animals that seemed to have been lost since Adam's exile".

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

In Wanting Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving, intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection in its many forms -- that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care, lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love.

Jon Fasman, Los Angeles Times