'Vanishing. Everything in Anna's world is vanishing. It starts with her finger, then her knee, then a breast, then a hand. Entire ecosystems vanish in climate-change-fueled wild fires. The orange-bellied parrot is vanishing. Yet as Anna finds herself emotionally and physically altered by these vanishings, almost nobody else seems to notice. Politicians obfuscate, people stare at screens, and the world continues its blithe march toward destruction. Set against this backdrop, Anna and her siblings engage in a grotesque struggle to prolong their dying mother's life. Richard Flanagan's most recent novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, is at its core a family drama and a quest for self-actualization wrapped up in social commentary about capitalism and technological dependence.' (Introduction)
