Internationally acclaimed and profoundly moving, Richard Flanagan's Wanting is a stunning tale of colonialism, ambition, and the lusts and longings that make us human. Now in paperback, it links two icons of Western civilization through a legendarily disastrous arctic exploration, and one of the most infamous episodes in human history: the colonization of Tasmania.
In 1841, Sir John Franklin and his wife, Lady Jane, move to the remote penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania. There Lady Jane falls in love with a lively aboriginal girl, Mathinna, whom she adopts and makes the subject of a grand experiment in civilization--one that will determine whether science, Christianity, and reason can be imposed in the place of savagery, impulse, and desire.
A quarter of a century passes. Sir John Franklin disappears in the Arctic with his crew and two ships on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. England is horrified by reports of cannibalism filtering back from search parties, no one more so than the most celebrated novelist of the day, Charles Dickens. As Franklin's story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own life, Dickens finds a young actress thawing his heart.

A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land, The Sound of One Hand Clapping was both critically acclaimed and a best-seller in Australia. It is a virtuoso performance from an Australian who is emerging as one of our most talented new storytellers. It was 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, where Bojan Buloh had brought his family to start a new life away from Slovenia, the privations of war, and refugee settlements. One night, Bojan's wife walked off into a blizzard, never to return -- leaving Bojan to drink too much to quiet his ghosts, and to care for his three-year-old daughter Sonja alone. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the barbarism of an old world left behind, about the harshness of a new country, and the destiny of those in a land beyond hope who seek to redeem themselves through love.

From the internationally acclaimed author of Gould's Book of Fish comes an astonishing new novel, a riveting portrayal of a society driven by fear. What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country? Gina Davies is about to find out when, after a night spent with an attractive stranger, she becomes a prime suspect in the investigation of an attempted terrorist attack. In The Unknown Terrorist, one of the most brilliant writers working in the English language today turns his attention to the most timely of subjects -- what our leaders tell us about the threats against us, and how we cope with living in fear. Chilling, impossible to put down, and all too familiar, The Unknown Terrorist is a relentless tour de force that paints a devastating picture of a contemporary society gone haywire, where the ceaseless drumbeat of terror alert levels, newsbreaks, and fear of the unknown pushes a nation ever closer to the breaking point.

Is Tasmanian salmon one big lie?

In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world's best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine conditions. What could be more appealing than the idea of Atlantic salmon sustainably harvested in some of the world's purest waters? But what are we eating when we eat Tasmanian salmon?

Richard Flanagan's exposé of the salmon farming industry in Tasmania is chilling. In the way that Rachel Carson took on the pesticide industry in her ground-breaking book Silent Spring, Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing. From the burning forests of the Amazon to the petrochemicals you aren't told about to the endangered species being pushed to extinction you don't know about; from synthetically pink-dyed flesh to seal bombs . . .

If you care about what you eat, if you care about the environment, this is a book you need to read. Toxic is set to become a landmark book of the twenty-first century.

From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author comes a dazzling novel of family, love and love's disappointments

Anna's aged mother is dying. Condemned by her children's pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her, others are similarly vanishing, yet no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into an eerily beautiful story of grief and possibility, of loss and love and orange-bellied parrots.

Hailed on publication in Australia as Richard Flanagan's greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm illuminating what remains when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope.

This volume breaks tradition with previous studies of the unemployed in Britain. It offers a history highlighting the active political nature of the unemployed, rather than a depiction of them as passive victims of the system whose existence signals economic decline and social injustice. Beginning with the first appearance of the jobless as a political group in 1884, Richard Flanagan reduces large amounts of available information on their activities-- outlining the major points that define the nature of the politics of the unemployed, discussing their troubled leadership, and documenting the government's response to their efforts through the end of the National Unemployment Workers' Movement in 1939.

Curious as to why much of the information about Britain's unemployed has been overlooked, Flanagan lifts the literature on the subject out of what he considers to be a largely fictionalized view by presenting a factual, historically relevant account examining the unemployed in relation to their society, past and present, and how they were able to overcome their diversity at certain times of crisis to form a single political voice and gain some control over their lives. The study reaches beyond the immediate subject, as its conclusions reflect upon the connection between unemployment and any industrialized society, the viability of certain solutions to the conflicts between classes, and most importantly, the political influence that even the most disadvantaged can exert if encouraged to take an active role in their future.

Un extraordinario tapiz de la Australia del siglo XIX.
El libro de los peces de William Gould es el retrato de un mundo de convictos, pr fugos, flageladores, colonizadores, ladrones y v ctimas cuya sangrienta historia se describe en esta novela siguiendo una original taxonom a de doce peces.

En aquellos d as William Buelow Gould, protagonista de esta historia, es sentenciado a cadena perpetua en la famosa colonia penitenciaria de la isla de Sara, en la Tierra de Van Diemen (hoy Tasmania).
Mientras cumple condena a la espera de su ejecuci n, Gould escribe un libro sobre los peces que pinta para el m dico de la colonia, aficionado a la historia natural. En esas pinturas, adem s de realizar bellas ilustraciones cient ficas, Gould introduce trazos inequ vocamente humanos. As , El libro de los peces de William Gould se convierte en la cr nica de la vida en prisi n, de sus reos y carceleros, y de la cruel naturaleza del hombre, de c mo el ser humano puede liderar su propia revoluci n mediante el amor.
Rese as:
Un escritor excelente. , BR>Ian McEwan
Richard Flanagan roza la grandeza literaria.
Chicago Tribune
En estas p ginas, Flanagan utiliza su talento para regalar al lector no solo la comprensi n visceral de las crueldades y las corrupciones de la raza humana, sino tambi n el reconocimiento de sus glorias y su perseverancia, su habilidad para convertir el sufrimiento en arte.
The New York Times
Flanagan vuelve al agua para sumergirnos en la historia colonial y penal de Tasmania. Flotando junto a l ...] se encuentran las voces de, entre otros, Garc a M rquez, Borges, Sterne y Melville.
The Independent
Hay mucho que saborear en este relato picaresco de monstruosidades, mucha imaginaci n desbocada, mucha iron a astuta y mucha anarqu a c mica.
The Guardian
Esta extraordinaria novela es una meditaci n sobre el colonialismo, o, m s bien, sobre la historia en s misma. ...] Una visi n serena y escalofriante de la vida humana, comparable a la de los peces, nadando en la enorme frialdad, solos.
The New Yorker

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish.

He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled.

Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould's Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish

Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he's finally caught a break when he's offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried Ziggy Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write the book.

But Ziggy swiftly proves almost impossible to work with: evasive, contradictory, and easily distracted by his still-running business concerns--which Kif worries may involve hiring hitmen from their shared office. Worse, Kif finds himself being pulled into an odd, hypnotic, and ever-closer orbit of all things Ziggy. As the deadline draws near, Kif becomes increasingly unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Ziggy is rewriting him--his life, his future, and the very nature of the truth.

By turns comic, compelling, and finally chilling, First Person is a haunting look at an age where fact is indistinguishable from fiction, and freedom is traded for a false idea of progress.