“Gould,” which is really a book about how history is told and transmitted, is set predominantly in Tasmania’s colonial era and centers on a prisoner referred to by his jailers only as a number. That sense of unreality pervades “Gould’s Book of Fish” (2001), Flanagan’s third novel and first masterpiece it’s a work of magical realism, reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez with its shape-shifting, anthropomorphic characters and time-travelling narrative. In a piece for this magazine in 2013, Flanagan described Tasmania, where he still lives, as an “island Wunderkammer, crammed full of the exotic and the strange, the beautiful and the cruel, conducive not to notions of progress but to a sense of unreality.” More than mere biographical detail, this remote island and its troubled, often violent history is one of his obsessions. Richard Flanagan, who yesterday became the third Australian to win the Booker Prize, for his novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” was born in Tasmania.
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