Skip to content

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Click for full-size.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Flanagan, Richard

  • Used
  • near fine
  • Hardcover
  • Signed
  • first
Condition
Near Fine/New
ISBN 10
0701189053
ISBN 13
9780701189051
Seller
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Naas, Kildare, Ireland
Item Price
$318.77
Or just $296.78 with a
Bibliophiles Club Membership
$27.48 Shipping to USA
Standard delivery: 8 to 12 days

More Shipping Options

Payment Methods Accepted

  • Visa
  • Mastercard
  • American Express
  • Discover
  • PayPal

About This Item

London, United Kingdom: Chatto & Windus, 2014. Book. Near Fine. Hardcover. Signed by Author(s). 1st Edition. First UK Edition, First Printing. A True UK first edition, first printing (first impression) with the number "1" to the copyright page to indicate a true first print in a New Dust Jacket. A touch of toning to the pages otherwise fine and unread. Very Uncommon as a first print. Signed by Richard flanagan to the title page. Winner of the 2014 Manbooker prize..

Synopsis

RICHARD FLANAGAN is the author of five previous novels,  Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist,  and  Wanting . He lives in Tasmania.

Reviews

On Feb 23 2017, CloggieDownunder said:
4.5 stars

"There was around him an exhausted emptiness, an impenetrable void cloaked this most famously collegial man, as if he already lived in another place – forever unravelling and refurling a limitless dream or an unceasing nightmare, it was hard to know – from which he would never escape. He was a lighthouse whose light could not be relit"

The Narrow Road to The Deep North is the sixth novel by award-winning Australian author, Richard Flanagan. Despite his humble beginnings in a remote Tasmanian village filled with "verandah-browed wooden cottages", Dorrigo Evans is clever enough to get scholarships for high school and university. He leaves the locale where he used to "smell the damp bark and drying leaves and watch clans of green and red musk lorikeets chortling far above. He would drink in the birdsong of the wrens and the honeyeaters, the whipcrack call of the jo-wittys…"

By 1940, he is a promising young surgeon, engaged to Ella Lansbury, a girl from the right sort of family, when he joins the army. Stationed near Adelaide while awaiting dispatch overseas, Dorrigo's chance encounter with his Uncle Keith's young second wife, Any Mulvaney, results in a liaison he could neither have anticipated nor resisted.

A few years on, Dorrigo Evans is a Prisoner of War, in command of a thousand men charged with building the Burma Railway, where cruelty and death were unwelcome, but commonplace: "They had smoked to keep the dead out of their nostrils, they had joked to keep the dead from preying on their minds, they had eaten to remind themselves they were alive…"

Dorrigo is constantly wracked with feelings of inadequacy, but "He could do this, he told himself… He had no belief he could do it, but others believed he could do it. And if he believed in them believing in him, maybe he could hold onto himself"

The survivors return home to a life that feels alien: "He didn't fit with his own life anymore, his own life was breaking down, and all that did fit – his job, his family – seemed to be coming apart". Dorrigo goes through the motions, marries, has three children and "Occasionally, he felt something within him angry and defiant, but he was weary in a way he had never known, and it seemed far easier to allow his life to be arranged by a much broader general will than by his own individual, irrational and no doubt misplaced terrors"

A celebrated surgeon and a war hero, Dorrigo despises the society of which he is part: "He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause". From those who have been there, he sometimes hears words of wisdom: "Adversity brings out the best in us, the podgy War Graves Commission officer sitting next to him had said… It's the everyday living that does us in"

Using multiple narrators, Flanagan examines the well-known cruelty of the Japanese captors from both sides. He also exposes the staggeringly selfish attitudes of POW officers, the sometimes secretive, sometimes selfish and sometimes extraordinarily generous behaviour of enlisted men, and also the postwar politics of punishment. With descriptive prose that is exquisite, it is no wonder that this novel is a winner of several awards and a nominee for many more. Profoundly moving.

(Log in or Create an Account first!)

You’re rating the book as a work, not the seller or the specific copy you purchased!

Details

Bookseller
Kelleher Rare Books IE (IE)
Bookseller's Inventory #
006699
Title
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Author
Flanagan, Richard
Format/Binding
Hardcover
Book Condition
Used - Near Fine
Jacket Condition
New
Edition
1st Edition
ISBN 10
0701189053
ISBN 13
9780701189051
Publisher
Chatto & Windus
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Date Published
2014
Keywords
THE NARROW ROAD TO DEEP NORTH,FLANAGAN, RICHARD,FIRST EDITION, SIGNED
Bookseller catalogs
Fiction;

Terms of Sale

Kelleher Rare Books

30 day return guarantee, with full refund including shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.

About the Seller

Kelleher Rare Books

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2011
Naas, Kildare

About Kelleher Rare Books

Modern Literature, Irish, English, American,Modern first edition, first print signed fiction historical fiction, literary fiction, children's books, sci-fi, crime fiction fantasy fiction.

Glossary

Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

Fine
A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
First Edition
In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
Jacket
Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
Copyright page
The page in a book that describes the lineage of that book, typically including the book's author, publisher, date of...
New
A new book is a book previously not circulated to a buyer. Although a new book is typically free of any faults or defects, "new"...
Title Page
A page at the front of a book which may contain the title of the book, any subtitles, the authors, contributors, editors, the...

This Book’s Categories

tracking-