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 to her hospital window, through which she escapes into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, though no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive, stay the course that she and her brothers have set. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into an eerily gorgeous story about hope and love, hospital beds and orange-bellied parrots, beauty and solitude and regret. An ember storm of a novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams lays bare the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world, and makes an impassioned plea to avert our shared fate.

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