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With The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which made him one of Australia's most awarded young writers, Richard Flanagan made his acclaimed American debut. Now he gives us a fantastic, deeply moving novel as big and brawling, as strange and compelling as the land and people it describes. Beneath a waterfall over a remote Tasmanian mountain river, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, is drowning. Beset by visions simultaneously horrible and fabulous, he relives not merely his own life but that of his family and forebears. He sees his father Harry, burying his own father Boy, under a tree that bursts into flowers in midwinter yearly after. He sees Boy himself as a man, working on the river; and his Auntie Ellie, on her behalf way to fetch the doctor on her behalf sick grandchild, chased by the cow she believes is a Werowa spirit. Within the rain-forest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped with their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking, where the branches of his story hook up to family stories that are Aboriginal, Celtic, Italian, English, Chinese, and East European; stories that ground him in the land. As the river rises his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of the past Aljaz discovers the soul history of his country. An adventure tale that transforms into a spiritual odyssey, by turns earthy, dreaming, comic, tragic, vulgar, and moving, Death of the River Guide is a lovely, haunting story by one of the world's most exciting young writers.
