Flanagan’s father, who died the day he finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway. Questioning the meaning of heroism, the book explores what motivates acts of extreme cruelty and shows that perpetrators may be as much victims as those they abuse. The Man Booker prize judges described the book as ‘ a harrowing account of the cost of war to all who are caught up in it’. ‘elegantly wrought, measured and without an ounce of melodrama… nothing short of a masterpiece.’ The Financial Times The book centres upon the experiences of surgeon Dorrigo Evans in a Japanese POW camp on the now infamous Thailand-Burma railway. It takes its title from 17th-century haiku poet Matsuo Bashō‘s famous haibun Oku no Hosomichi, best known in English as The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the sixth novel by Richard Flanagan.
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