Richard Flanagan

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...

"Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, is rung in the middle of the night by the notorious con man and corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl offers Kehlmann the job of ghost-writing his memoir. He has six weeks to write the book, for which he'll be paid $10,000. But as the writing gets under way, Kehlmann begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. As the deadline draws...

When Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin takes governance of a penal colony, his wife, Lady Jane, adopts the charming Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, for a social experiment; years later, when Franklin disappears in the Arctic, cases of cannibalism are reported, horrifying English society.

Tasmanian river guide Aljaz Cosini, trapped beneath a waterfall after a rafting accident, sees not only his own life, but those of his ancestors pass before him as his slowly drowns.

"In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile."-- Provided by publisher....