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'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)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
Melbourne
:
Penguin
,
2020
19615971
2020
single work
novel
'In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.
'When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.
'An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving—and astonishing—best.' (Publication summary)
