Richard Flanagan

"From the author of the Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North comes a wrenching novel of family, climate change, and the resilience of the human spirit--an elegy to our disappearing world. In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying--if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she instead turns her focus...

In the early nineteenth century, forger and thief William Buelow Gould lands in prison in Australia, where the prison doctor utilizes his painting talents to create an illustrated taxonomy of the country's exotic sea creatures.