I found this a really challenging read that rewarded the effort and then some. It is very strangely structured in a complex and convincing way, stories sitting within stories like Russian dolls and all the experiences of a life building to the man who writes the novel and shares what he has learned.

Richard Flanagan moves through such a range of subjects, styles and intention that you have to concentrate to make the connections with him - from a love affair of HG Wells, through Hiroshima, Tasmania, and London in-between, you travel with the author through time and location to build up a really intimate picture of his inner life and motivations.

It had me spellbound and would merit more than one reading to really appreciate everything it holds.

Richard Flanagan writes a remarkably astonishing multi-genre, imaginative and speculative memoir that he describes as a love song to Tasmania, its history, his family, and a world that has vanished, questioning history's too often linear and limiting perspective,, and the sense and stories we personally construct of who we are and how we come to be where we are in the present. Anton Chekov's satirical and absurd Question 7 is cited, Who loves longer, a man or a woman? He juxtaposes the bleak darkest of tragedies, the devastating bombing of Hiroshima, with the serendipity that it simultaneously is the reason that he exists at all as his father was in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, a situation in which he would have surely died.

The dropping of the atomic bomb is traced backed to HG Wells and his love affair with Rebecca West, the break up of which has him writing The World Set Free, a book that inspired scientist Leo Szilar and traces the follow up to the horrors of the bomb itself. This characterises the chain reactions, a thoughtful set of circular life connections that Flanagan makes, including the part played by British colonialism in genocide and the destruction of the natural world. He is offering the kind of surprising insights and perspectives that undoubtedly will challenge accepted realities and make people think. He is unsparing in relating his failings and his frightening near death experience in a river.

This is a profound, philosophical and emotional read, a revealing, captivating memoir that takes in the bigger picture amidst the more personal and which I found utterly gripping as it shines a critical light on what is accepted as reality. It is a unforgettable brilliant 'memoir' that I have no hesitation in saying this is a must read and am recommending it to all readers, particularly as I believe this is the best thing that this acclaimed author has written! Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

Question 7 begins with an epigraph from a review of Moby-Dick in a 1851 edition of the Hobart Town Mercury. The reviewer is baffled as to whether they are reading “history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama or fantasy”. This neatly summarizes how the reader will feel about Question 7 and how Flanagan's memoir defies a single genre description. The narrative creates a spider web of interconnecting and chain reaction events. Fact and someone's "truth" is often mixed in with imaginative speculations or a discourse on Flanagan's philosphy of life and writing.

The book starts with Flanagan revisiting his father's incarceration in a Japanese work camp in World War II. The site in Omaha reveals no evidence of its existence, in fact a "Love Hotel" now stand there. Flanagan recounts how the horrifying annihilation of the populace meant that his father escaped his certain death through exhaustion in the camp and so, if it were not for the A bomb then he himself would not exist. He segues into the history of his home island, Tasmania and the devastating effects on the populace of colonialism and reveals details about his family history. Flanagan postulates that had HG Wells not had an affair with Rebecca West then he would not have run off to Switzerland where he wrote "The War of the Worlds", a novel that was read by the physicist Leo Szilard who became interested in the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction which then in turn led to the development of the atomic bomb. Flanagan also imagines what the first kiss between West and Wells was like. I've given these examples to show how the book jumos around and mixes fact, fiction, memory, history and wild sepculation.

I didn't find this an easy book to read. It required concentration and trying to keep in mind the myriad, jigsaw like pieces but I did find it thought provoking and an interesting way to construct a memoir. I liked how Flanagan revealed how we learn about and view our parents in new and different lights as we ourselves age. I found the final part of the book where Flanagan is almost drowned very poignant ( but I think it retreads ground covered in an early novel which I have not read). I'm still unsure about the meaning of Question 7 as regards the book. Question 7 is taken from a Chekhove story about a "Mad Mathematician" who puts forward a parody of a school maths problem: “Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” Throughout the book Flanagan asks "Who loves longer?" which made little sense to me. Perhaps that is the point of Question 7 - it is unsolvable and illogical and a bit mad - just like life, we never really know the answer, we can just make our own guesses and "truth" to make sense of an impossible situation.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I received the chance to read this book as it’s not my usual type of book. I was pleasantly surprised. Very well written. Great stories.