Rezension
Flanagan is one of our greatest living novelists, able to tackle material so wrenching that you can t stop reading. Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, like Jonathan Franzen s best novels, quietly traces a societal rift around wealth and what amounts to a good life . . . In the end, like Flanagan s best work the novel grounds itself in humane ideals. Love. Hope. Dignity. New York Times Book Review
What an astonishing book this is . . . Masterful . . . This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical. Sydney Morning Herald
Superb . . . It is a remarkable book and it serves Literature in the most insistent, dedicated, and demanding manner. Any novelist writing at this moment should write in such a way that no reader can remain indifferent or feign ignorance of our role in the subjugation of the world . . . Flanagan s novel is brave enough to say It s not about us any more. It really isn t. Joy Williams, Book Post
One of the most profound, moving novels I ve ever read, a true masterpiece. Cherilyn Parsons, LitHub
Gorgeous, mesmerizing . . . Reading Flanagan is like watching Federer at Wimbledon: he can do pretty much anything on the page and make it look easy, elegant . . . Flanagan never misses a beat. His language is drum-tight, his ear for prose rhythms impeccable . . . Flanagan has given us a novel that s inventive and lyrical, a dark meditation on where we are and where we may be headed. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is his finest work yet.
Hamilton Cain, Harvard Review
Flanagan writes movingly . . . His poetic prose and rigorously argued points make this novel hard to dismiss. At its strongest, the book poses an important question: What constitutes dignity? . . . How do our actions and motivations compromise the health of those around us? It s a question a year of unrelenting darkness has made all the more critical.
Michael Magras, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Provocative and disturbing . . . Vivid . . . A kaleidoscopic novel.
David L. Ulin, 4Columns
Richard Flanagan is one of the greatest writers at work in the world today I admire him and his writing immensely. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a haunting, urgent, and important book about our broken and confusing age.
James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd s Life
Peculiar and bewitching . . . The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a powerful rumination on frailty and mortality. Sarah Rachel Egelman, Book Reporter
Writers the world over are grappling with a version of this question: in the face of so much devastation, so much terror, what can fiction possibly achieve? The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is Flanagan s emphatic, wrenching answer. Guardian Australia
Like Richard Powers s The Overstory, this is a timely, unforgettable work of climate fiction. Booklist (starred)
A fiercely well-observed account of the psychological twists and turns, the stress points and the double-binds of familial love. Daily Telegraph
His prose has a pyrotechnic brilliance. Mail on Sunday
The brilliance of Flanagan s story and the deep power of this novel is in our witnessing of the end of the world . . . In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams it is a matriarch rather than a patriarch slowly, messily and unevenly passing out of the world [but] in this respect Flanagan s novel resembles Jonathan Franzen s The Corrections or HBO s Succession. The Conversation
Utterly dazzling. SFX
It concludes, astonishingly for a story about our flaws, our blindnesses the individual and collective fiasco that has brought us to this point with a message of hope. The Weekend Australian
Unforgettable . . . Flanagan shines in his fierce, surrealistic look at a family s dissolution in a recognizable if dystopian Australia that s ravaged by wildfires. Publishers Weekly (starred)
Like Richard Powers s The Overstory, this is a timely, unforgettable work of climate fiction. Booklist (starred)
