Will I love Question 7?

"Question 7" is a kind of memoir, but Flanagan accomplishes something much deeper than that implies. This is a profound and moving reflection on memory, history, family, loss, love, and time. It took me to a place and time that was almost wholly new to me, but in a way that felt intimate and familiar.

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, this magnificent book begins as a memoir with Flannagan visiting the site of the POW camp in Japan where his father was subjected to slave labor during WWII, was starved, and faced certain death, saved only by the atomic bomb dropping on nearby Hiroshima. Throughout this book, Flanagan grapples with the fact he exists only because of this tragedy (as I grapple in Irena’s Gift with the fact I exist only because a Nazi SS officer who tortured and killed women saved my mother.)  

Often, in families of war survivors, one son… show more.