22 Nov Eyes on The Prize

The past couple of months have seen the announcement of a number major prizes for literary fiction – and we now have them all on our shelves. Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus) is his haunting story of prisoners of war on the notorious Burma-Siam Death Railway. Here’s the opening line: “Why at the beginning of things is there always light?”

“Flanagan’s writing courses like a river, sometimes black with mud, sludge and corpses, sometimes bright with moonlight… The stories of these casualties of fate catch at the soul”.

– Catherine Taylor

“Flanagan’s novel is a grand examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh and, above all, of how hard it is to live after survival”.

– Thomas Keneally