The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

By: Richard Flanagan

Narrated by: Essie Davis

Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 listener ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.

©2021 Richard Flanagan (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Superb writing, masterfully read by Essie Davis.

This is a perfect union of a masterful writer and reader. I devoured every minute.

powerfully real and unusual

Magic realism or horror it is not, but a gripping fantastic-hyperbolic account of man's madness in his failure to understand the meaning of death and sanctity of love. The vibe of the terrible bushfire devestation and lack of hope regards environmental balance prevails; it gave me much hope to read the accurate and fresh observations of the decline of human reason and an opportunity to pity people trapped in their own fear and loneliness. In saying it like it is we get room to think about how to proceed on a radically new holistic front, a dire prerequisite implied by the sheer fragmentation and literal dissolution of all coherence and the failings of modern constructs of abstraction.