![]() “I had known for a long time that this was the book I had to write if I was to keep on writing,” Flanagan said recently. Flanagan’s late father was a survivor of that atrocity, which took the lives of more than 12,000 Allied prisoners. ![]() ![]() ![]() Once the Japanese captured Burma, though, its army needed a more efficient resupply route, and so the impossible became possible in just over a year by using some 300,000 people as disposable labor. The British had long investigated this route, but they deemed the jungle impenetrable. Nothing since Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has shaken me like this - all the more so because it’s based on recorded history, rather than apocalyptic speculation.Ī finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, “The Narrow Road to the Deeper North” portrays a singular episode of manic brutality: imperial Japan’s construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in the early 1940s. Beware Richard Flanagan’s new novel, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.” His story about a group of Australian POWs during World War II will cast a shadow over your summer and draw you away from friends and family into dark contemplation the way only the most extraordinary books can. ![]()
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