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Gould's Book of Fish
Richard Flanagan
'Gould's Book of Fish is a masterpiece' The Times
The literary sensation of 2002 - and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Fiction, 2002 - now in paperback.
Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all the living things on the land and the fishes in the sea were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a convict in Van Dieman's Land who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer, forger, fantasist, condemned to live in the most brutal penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Once upon a time, miraculous things happened...
'Gould's Book of Fish is a novel about fish the way Moby-Dick is a novel about whales, or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day' New York Times
'A seamless masterpiece' Independent on Sunday
'Ferocious in its anger, grotesque, sexy, funny, violent, startlingly beautiful and, above all, heartbreakingly sad... I urge you to read it.' Observer
'Hugely original... There is so much to savour in this rolling, picaresque tale of grotesques and their progress: so much unfettered imagination, so much sly irony and comic anarchy. Passages burn with the intense pleasure of story-making, of the abandon that comes from a seething of ideas and their joyful mutation into words' Guardian
'Flanagan is a vivid, voluptuous, exhilarating writer' Sunday Telegraph
About the author
Richard Flanagan is the author of Death of a River Guide (Picador) and The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Picador), both of which were published to international acclaim. He lives in Tasmania.
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Paperback
Published March 2003
ISBN: 978 1 84354 070 0
RRP: £7.99