Cirrus@Austlit

'When the characters in Richard Flanagan’s intriguing new novel look at their phones, the sentences run on without punctuation. It’s a stylistic, reader-focused tic: We join the uninterrupted stream of photos and headlines from the catastrophic wildfires that scorched Australia a little over a year ago. We glide past “incinerated kangaroos in fetal clutches of fencing wire charred koalas burnt bloated cattle on their backs.”' (Introduction)