Book description
'Striking...brilliantly done' The Times
An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best.
Anna's aged mother is dying - if her three children would just allow it. Forced by their pity to stay alive, she increasingly escapes through her hospital window…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Living Sea of Waking Dreams as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This novel is challenging in all the best ways. It took me three tries to get into it…but once I “got it” I was hooked. The story follows Anna and her (kind of awful) siblings as they try (and largely fail) to deal with each other and their elderly mother’s decline and impending death. As if this subject were not hot enough, the novel takes place against the backdrop of the climate crisis. This is an original, serious, and existentially charged read that definitely takes the fun out of family dysfunction. Yet amazingly, the darker and more abstract this book…
From Nancy's list on The best novels about families you wish were yours…and families you’re glad are not.
If you love The Living Sea of Waking Dreams...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
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