The Living Sea Of Waking Dreams

Local Description

 

CONSTANT READER REVIEW: RICHARD

Three grown siblings are drawn together by the sudden need to make arrangements for the medical care of their aged mother. They come together from very different places in their lives and are forced to confront the big issues. All of this happens amid the catastrophic threat of bushfires and growing technology-driven disconnection from physical reality. To further complicate matters, one of the three children, Anna, has noticed parts of her body and of her teenage son beginning to disappear into thin air.

Flanagan takes a typically sensitive and lyrical approach to the key themes of aging, mortality, what it means to “succeed”, our connection with each other and our connection with our surroundings. He handles the element of magical realism with his usual calm understatement. and the connection with the Tasmanian environment is central as always. Another winner from an author at the peak of his powers.

 

 

Description

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is an ember storm of a novel. This is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best.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 story about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.

Promotion info

   

Awards

Shortlisted for the VIC Premier’s Award for Fiction 2021 Shortlisted for the Indie Book Award for Fiction 2021

Reviews

MACLEAN'S REVIEW:

Set in the near future, this novel has many layers embedded within the central story of a dying mother. Her children become determined to prolong her life and we are confronted with the ethical dilemmas that unfold during the final phase of Francie's life. Flanagan poses the possibility that we've forgotten how to live and perhaps this is why dying does not sit comfortably with us. Within the background, ecological systems are collapsing, bushfires have become constant and unrelenting. All that is beautiful is essentially disappearing before our eyes. There's a lovely metaphor here with vanishing body parts that lends a magical realism to the story. I loved this book, very timely and intriguing.

- Ramona