Tag Archives: Roisin O’Donnell

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan won last year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and is a seamless combination of memoir, history, science and ethics. It connects Flanagan’s father’s experience of being a prisoner of war in Japan (which also inspired his Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North) with 1930s nuclear physicists, an affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, the colonial history of Tasmania, and Flanagan’s near-death experience in a kayaking accident in his early 20s, while the title of the book is taken from Anton Chekhov’s exam question parody. This combination of topics probably doesn’t sound very coherent, and some parts are very cerebral and meandering, but Flanagan blends them into a truly unique and poignant piece of non-fiction about the absurdity of life and its consequences. Continue reading →