Cirrus@Austlit

'Within the first few pages of Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, one encounters a raft of losses. The book, which centres around three siblings, Anna, Tommy and Terzo, and their mother Francie, opens with the vanishing of Anna’s middle finger; Tommy recounts the loss of ladybirds, soldier beetles, bluebottles, earwigs, Christmas beetles, flying ant swarms, frogs and cicadas and their songs, emperor gum moths, Persian rug wings, quolls, potoroos, pardalotes, swift parrots, great kelp forests, abalone, and crayfish; and it becomes known that there is a fourth sibling, Ronnie, who died in his teens.' (Editorial introduction)