The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.

August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

Read Caroline Baum's Review

When Richard Flanagan produces a new book, you know it will come freighted with Big Themes. As an essayist, Flanagan is political, provocative, passionate. As a novelist, he is capable of shape-shifting across genres, from high literary gothic to popular psychological thriller.

His latest novel is as eloquent and powerful an affirmation of his empathy and understanding of humanity as anything he's ever written. An elegy to the men of the Thai Burma railroad and their Japanese masters, it's a book about so many things: brutality, barbarity, tenderness, regret, heroism, friendship, betrayal, the manufacturing of national heroism and the mythologizing of one man as a symbol for a nation's pain and pride.

Basing his central character Dorrigo Evans on that of legendary war hero and surgeon Weary Dunlop is a bold move, Dunlop is a sacrosanct figure in Australia's war narrative, an untouchable icon of sacrifice, honour, resilience and courage.

Evans is flawed, with a weakness for women in general and one woman in particular, allowing Flanagan to contrast the prisoner-of-war chapters with flashbacks to moments of stolen intimacy for some relief from the relentless sadism and degradation.

PS the new Colin Firth film, The Railway Man seems to explore similar territory. The two might make interesting, if harrowing, companions.