Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan

Description

Bibliographic Details

• Author: Richard Flanagan
• Title: Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel In 12 Fish
• Publisher: ‎ Grove Press
• Publication Date: April 1, 2002
• Language: ‎ English
• Format: Hardcover – 404 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 0802117112
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0802117113
• Item Weight: ‎ 1.58 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎ 5.25 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches
• Book Condition: Used – Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Synopsis:

Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled.

Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould’s Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.

About the Author:

Richard Miller Flanagan (born 1961) is an Australian novelist from Tasmania. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honors. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

Flanagan is an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, to which he donated his $40,000 prize money on winning the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Prize in 2014. A painting of Richard Flanagan by artist Geoffrey Dyer won the 2003 Archibald Prize. A rapid on the Franklin River, Flanagan's Surprise, is named after him. He was made an Honorary Citizen of Oxford, Mississippi, the home town of William Faulkner, in 2014.

Flanagan lives in Hobart, Tasmania with his Slovenian-born wife Majda (née Smolej) and has three daughters, Rosie, Jean and Eliza.

His life was the subject of a BAFTA award-winning BBC documentary, Life After Death.