Chatto & Windus has snapped up Booker Prize-winner Richard Flanagan’s latest work of non-fiction, Question 7.
Publishing director Clara Farmer acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada, Australia and New Zealand) from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency. It will publish in hardback, e-book and audio (narrated by the author) on 30th May 2024.
Question 7 “is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows”. The publisher said: “By way of H G Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.”
Chatto described the work as a “hypnotic melding of memory and history, science and dream” which shows “how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves”.
Farmer said: “It’s always so good to be back reading Richard Flanagan. Question 7 is a scintillating encounter, the writing astonishingly limber and acrobatic. It is a memoir that hurls itself beyond categorisation and speaks to the big questions of war and peace, love and loss. But is also Richard’s most personal book – and his descriptions of home and family go straight to the heart. Question 7 stares into the eyes of death yet is intensely and joyfully alive. The reaction to the book in Australia is electrifying and we can’t wait for UK readers to share the experience.”
Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus) and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish (Vintage).
