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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Essie Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
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Publisher's Summary
From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author comes a dazzling novel of family, love, and love's disappointments.
Anna's aged mother is dying. Condemned by her children's pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes 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, yet 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 an eerily beautiful story of grief and possibility, of loss and love and orange-bellied parrots.
Hailed on publication in Australia as Richard Flanagan's greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm, illuminating what remains when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope.
What the critics say
"Flanagan is one of our greatest living novelists, able to tackle material so wrenching that you can’t stop reading.” (Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post)
“Gorgeous, mesmerizing ... Reading Flanagan is like watching Federer at Wimbledon: he can do pretty much anything on the page and make it look easy, elegant ... Flanagan never misses a beat. His language is drum-tight, his ear for prose rhythms impeccable .... Flanagan has given us a novel that’s inventive and lyrical, a dark meditation on where we are and where we may be headed. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is his finest work yet." (Hamilton Cain, Harvard Review)
“The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, like Jonathan Franzen’s best novels, quietly traces a societal rift around wealth and what amounts to a ‘good life’.... In the end, like Flanagan’s best work the novel grounds itself in humane ideals. Love. Hope. Dignity.” (New York Times Book Review)