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elisabeth7291 's review for:
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
by Richard Flanagan
“A good book… leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul,” says Dorrigo Evans, the lead character of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. There’s a whole lotta soul readin’ over here.
Flanagan said it is the book he knew he’d have to write if he kept on writing. For him, it is deeply personal – his father, a survivor of the horror the novel depicts. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and fully deserves it.
Narrow Road centers around a group of Australian POWs who worked on the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II and particularly during a phase called “Speedo” where prisoners were forced to work double shifts in order to make faster progress on the line. Like many WWII novels, the depiction of the conditions are at times unbearable. There were moments in my reading when I thought, “No wonder this won the Man Booker – the judges felt that if they had to endure reading this book twice, it better be for something!” In all seriousness, the descriptions of the dysentery, lice, cholera, beriberi, skin ulcers, scurvy, not to mention the all-out beatings, are the most emotionally draining I’ve encountered.
Read the rest of my review here: The Narrow Road to the Deep North review
Flanagan said it is the book he knew he’d have to write if he kept on writing. For him, it is deeply personal – his father, a survivor of the horror the novel depicts. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and fully deserves it.
Narrow Road centers around a group of Australian POWs who worked on the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II and particularly during a phase called “Speedo” where prisoners were forced to work double shifts in order to make faster progress on the line. Like many WWII novels, the depiction of the conditions are at times unbearable. There were moments in my reading when I thought, “No wonder this won the Man Booker – the judges felt that if they had to endure reading this book twice, it better be for something!” In all seriousness, the descriptions of the dysentery, lice, cholera, beriberi, skin ulcers, scurvy, not to mention the all-out beatings, are the most emotionally draining I’ve encountered.
Read the rest of my review here: The Narrow Road to the Deep North review