Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?

Only the monsters do not have troubled hearts.
Life is for troubled hearts. Art is for troubled
hearts. For my whole life, Hamlet has been
a bridge between. Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother,
what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something
is always the matter, and not just for mothers.
(As I write this, the Angelus rings.) Every
character in Hamlet is troubled, there are
no monsters in it. I render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s — everything is
troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar
is troubled. I render unto God the things
that are God’s and feel — want to feel? Do feel —
that God is troubled. I also render unto art.
But I have no idea what art is. What
Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ is. What
the luminous chaos of The Portrait of
a Lady is. What The Pilgrim’s Progress is.
My feet knew the way before I opened
the book: that just before the gate to heaven
is yet another hole to hell.

Richard W Halperin was born in Chicago to an Irish mother, and an American father with Russian ancestry. Early in his childhood the family moved to New York. He taught for a short period at Hunter College, and subsequently made a career in education administration, latterly with Unesco in Paris, where he currently lives.

Now, Mother, What’s the Matter? is from the New Poems section of All the Tattered Stars: Selected and New Poems published by Salmon Poetry in 2023 to celebrate Halperin’s 80th birthday.

The New York School’s influence is audible in his work’s refreshing lightness of texture. Halperin is deeply serious, though, about the function and power of art, cinema and the literary arts in particular. Considering the impact of a poem sequence by an unnamed writer, he says of their portrayal of daughterhood, “None of this is my experience, / All of it is my experience. / Don’t tell me I cannot be daughter.”

Hamlet’s address to his mother, Gertrude, which forms the current poem’s title, is freighted with his still-to-be-spoken accusation – of lechery and adultery with his uncle, Claudius, if not direct connivance in the murder of his father, King Hamlet. Halperin, abandoning quote marks or footnotes, cleverly escapes Shakespeare at the same time, and allows himself a little dry fun with the ideal of universality. The unanchored question inevitably sheds some of its specific complexity, and starts to look like a sentence a contemporary son or daughter might utter to a mother who is entirely innocent of the dangerous “matter” associated with Gertrude. Perhaps, as the child’s emphatic “Now” might suggest, this mother is overdoing some small complaint, and the words are uttered with mockery or exasperation rather than complete earnestness (though the latter isn’t impossible). Halperin’s artfully expanded context demonstrates the subjectivity of artistic interpretation.

His speaker goes on to renew, lightly, the seriousness associated with the original context. The near-euphemism “troubled hearts” suggests a complex perspective from which to read Hamlet’s mother and the play’s other characters – in fact, mothers and “others” in general. Hamlet, the play, has always been the speaker’s bridge between “life” and “art”, he says, since both are “for troubled hearts”. “Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother, / what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something / is always the matter, and not just for mothers.” Art permits self-recognition: it brings “troubled hearts” into an encounter with themselves.

This “matter” is gracefully expressed, with the interrupting comment from the Angelus bell pertinently timed. The Angelus marks the incarnation of Christ announced when the Angel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary. It’s now that Halperin’s denial of there being any “monsters” in Hamlet makes a sharpened point. Art offers a route out of the judgmental “monsters v angels” binaries of religion, though not, of course, a route out of the problems of morality.

In the agreed obligation to Caesar, referencing Christ’s words from Matthew 22:21, Halperin projects himself into that imperial political scene and updates it: “I render unto Caesar / the things that are Caesar’s — everything is / troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar / is troubled. I render unto God the things / that are God’s and feel — want to feel? — do feel / that God is troubled. I also render unto art.”

Being “troubled” might be less of a guarantee of compassion than hoped. But the cleverly nervous enjambment that sustains a biblical and colloquial mix of register encourages tentative optimism.

As the speaker disarmingly confesses, he has “no idea what art is”. Art seems more demanding than any Caesar. The intransitive form of “render” in “I also render unto art” suggests more than self-giving service – the possibility of psychic “rending”, for example.

The three literary texts the speaker cites later seem random, but may have a common theme of pilgrimage, one that might stretch to include both the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer, and the poet Edward Thomas. The concept admits Halperin’s persona, too: “My feet knew the way before I opened / the book”. The mind is pre-patterned with the traditional techniques of storytelling. What the speaker unquestioningly knows is “that just before the gate to heaven / is yet another hole to hell.” That conclusion is surprising and suggests the unilluminable: then we remember the poet Dante, who illuminated the hell holes, too. Without irony, Halperin reveals the magnitude of the literary pilgrimage.

Drama and fiction, poetry and allegory, are consolidated by the last three lines; “troubled hearts” and “holes to hell” are always integral. To travel these worlds, without rejecting the human-ness of the misnamed demons and monsters, may be another foundational characteristic of literary art.

Leah Williamson, Michael Morpurgo, Julia Donaldson and Richard Osman are among those who have thrown their weight behind a new nationwide push to get people reading for pleasure, as the government and the National Literacy Trust launch the National Year of Reading.

The year-long campaign, called Go All In, aims to reverse what organisers describe as a “worrying decline” in reading enjoyment among children and young people. Just one in three 8- to 18-year-olds now say they enjoy reading in their spare time. Only 26% of boys read for pleasure, compared to 39% of girls. More than a quarter of children are leaving primary school having not reached the reading age of an 11-year-old.

Unveiled on Tuesday at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, the campaign brings together schools, families, libraries, businesses and cultural organisations, alongside a high-profile group of ambassadors including captain of the England women’s football team Williamson, authors Osman and Cressida Cowell, musician and writer George the Poet, and actor Paterson Joseph, among others.

Launching the initiative, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said reading had been central to her own childhood. “Some of my happiest childhood memories are of reading with my grandad, getting lost in The Chronicles of Narnia together,” she said. “I want every child to feel that same joy, whether their passion is football, fantasy, or physics.”

Phillipson described reversing the decline in reading for pleasure as “a national mission”, adding: “Through the National Year of Reading and our Plan for Change we are making sure every child and young person has access to a wide range of books.” She urged families to “read together for just 10 minutes a day”.

The campaign encourages people to read about what they already love, in whatever format suits them, including novels, comics, blogs or audiobooks.

“Pick up a book, listen to an audiobook, get stuck into articles on whatever you love,” said Williamson. “It all counts.”

Osman said he was proud to support the National Year of Reading 2026, adding: “in an increasingly noisy, complicated world, reading is our quiet superpower.”

Jonathan Douglas, chief executive of the National Literacy Trust, said the campaign offered “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate the UK’s relationship with reading and change people’s life stories”. He added: “Whether it’s a baby experiencing the magic of a picture book for the first time … or an adult reading the football pages on their commute, reading is for everyone.”

The initiative builds on existing government measures – including a new mandatory reading test for all pupils in year 8, a £5m investment to support reading in secondary schools, and a £10m investment to make sure every primary school in England has a library by the end of this parliament – and will feature national events, local activities and a drive to recruit 100,000 literacy volunteers across the UK.

The creator of some of British television’s most beloved sitcoms, a Match of the Day presenter and a Chuckle Brother are among the figures from the arts and media to be recognised in the new year honours list.

Roy Clarke, who created some of the most popular BBC shows of the previous century, has been honoured with a knighthood. He has had a huge impact on British television, creating shows including Last of the Summer Wine, Keeping Up Appearances and Open All Hours.

The success of his work has immortalised some of his fictional characters, including the curtain-twitching snob Hyacinth Bucket, who featured in Keeping Up Appearances alongside her put-upon husband, Richard.

Compo, Clegg and Nora Batty, from Last of the Summer Wine, are also among his lasting creations.

Clarke worked as a taxi driver and teacher before finding a talent for writing thrillers for radio. Last of the Summer Wine first aired in 1973. It ran for 31 seasons, with an audience peaking at 18 million viewers in the heyday of linear television.

Open All Hours was the peak of the collaboration between Ronnie Barker and David Jason. Barker’s character, miserly shopkeeper Albert Arkwright, spent four series setting tasks for his assistant, Granville, played by Jason.

A damehood was awarded to Meera Syal, the actor and star of The Kumars at No 42. Syal, one of the first British Asian people to regularly star on British TV and a staple of the influential comedy show Goodness Gracious Me, has been praised as a barrier-breaking pioneer.

Accepting a Bafta lifetime achievement award in 2023, she said the TV industry needed more diversity, “not just in front of the camera but in the writers’ rooms, in makeup vans and around tables where deals are done”.

Paul Elliott, known for his role as half of the Chuckle Brothers, said the MBE he received was “probably the best shock” of his life. Nearly 300 episodes were made of the slapstick children’s show ChuckleVision, which featured Elliott and his brother Barry, who died of bone cancer in 2017, aged 73.

Elliott has been a prominent supporter of the Marie Curie cancer charity, which provided end-of-life care for Barry.

Gabby Logan, the sports presenter who is one of Gary Lineker’s replacements hosting Match of the Day, was awarded an OBE for services to sports broadcasting and to charity.

Clive Tyldesley, formerly ITV’s lead football commentator, was recognised with an OBE. His most famous commentary came in the 1999 Champions League final, when he crowned Manchester United’s dramatic comeback win against Bayern Munich with the words: “And Solskjaer has won it.”

Elsewhere in the entertainment world, there was an MBE for Location, Location, Location presenter Phil Spencer and former Coronation Street star Sally Lindsay, who played Rovers Return landlady Shelley Unwin.

Comedian and former Great British Bake Off presenter Matt Lucas said he had to check whether his letter informing him he had been awarded an OBE was a prank. An MBE went to fellow comedian Bill Bailey.

Richard Osman’s runaway success as an author, which followed a career as a TV executive and co-host of the quizshow Pointless, brought him an OBE for services to literature and broadcasting. His book The Impossible Fortune, the fifth in his Thursday Murder Club series, topped the bestsellers list for 2025.

There were also OBEs for two women touted as possible successors to Tim Davie, the outgoing BBC director general. They were awarded to Charlotte Moore, until recently the BBC’s chief content officer, and Alex Mahon, formerly Channel 4’s chief executive.

Fantasy, mystery and psychological thriller series dominate the UK’s bestsellers list for 2025, topped by Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune. The fifth book in his Thursday Murder Club series secured the top position at 391,429 hardback sales.

Adult colouring also had a resurgence this year: colouring books aimed at all ages made it into the top 20 chart, according to analysis by NielsenIQ BookData.

Coming in behind Osman is Freida McFadden with the 2022 psychological thriller The Housemaid (the follow-up, The Housemaid’s Secret, also appears in the top 20), and in third place is Suzanne Collins’ prequel to The Hunger Games, Sunrise on the Reaping.

In literary fiction, the One Day author David Nicholls makes the top 20 with his romance You Are Here, along with Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky. In self-help, The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins and her daughter has continued to dominate, shifting 218,919 copies in hardback this year.

Osman’s 2024 release, We Solve Murders, reached fourth on the chart. Close behind was Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm, the third book in her Empyrean fantasy romance series. Two earlier instalments, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, were also among the 20 bestselling books of the year. For the release of Onyx Storm, readers gathered in Waterstones across the country in January to attend late-night launch celebration parties. The romantasy author Sarah J Maas appeared in 10th place with A Court of Thorns and Roses, the first book in her acclaimed series.

Comedian Bob Mortimer’s The Hotel Avocado, the sequel to The Satsuma Complex, sold 210,116 paperbacks this year and was commended by Ella Risbridger in the Guardian as “totally affable and genuinely bonkers”. Lee Child and Andrew Child, Charlie Mackesy, Dan Brown, Kristin Hannah and Jamie Oliver also feature in the list.

Colouring books appear to be trending again as Coco Wyo’s Cozy Corner and Cozy Cuties, marketed to adults and children, made the top 15. The two books account for close to 500,000 sales this year.

“So many people have fallen for these beautiful colouring books because they provide people with a place to relax, unwind and get creative, away from screens,” said Fenella Bates, non-fiction publisher at Penguin Random House Children. “We’re encouraged to put down our phones and escape into the pages of these books, which have become a little pocket of calm in our hectic world.”

The rise of colouring as an adult hobby made headlines in 2015. That year, the Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford’s colouring books topped the Amazon bestsellers list in the US.

Bates has taken up colouring herself and said she has become “hooked on the books”, describing them as “a great way to destress and find a moment for yourself at the end of the day.”

Coming in at 20th overall was Nicholls’s You Are Here, a romance following the blossoming of a relationship between two divorcees on a hiking trip through the Lake District.

Federico Andornino, Nicholls’s editor and executive publisher at Spectre, attributes the book’s success to readers’ cravings for escapism and connection. “No one does that better than David: he’s got the very rare gift of making people think, laugh out loud and cry – often in the same chapter,” he said.

The top 20 bestsellers of 2025

1. The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman (Viking, hardback) – 391,429 copies

2. The Housemaid by Freida McFadden (Little, Brown, paperback) – 342,899 copies

3. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic, hardback) – 333,340 copies

4. We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Penguin, paperback) – 323,293 copies

5. Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (Piatkus, hardback) – 304,728 copies

6. Always Remember by Charlie Mackesy (Ebury Press, hardback) – 286,090 copies

7. Cozy Corner by Coco Wyo (Penguin, paperback) – 255,682 copies

8. The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown (Bantam, hardback) – 245,318 copies

9. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (Piatkus, paperback) – 241,532 copies

10. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas (Bloomsbury, paperback) – 224,535 copies

11. The Women by Kristin Hannah (Pan, paperback) – 220,629 copies

12. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins and Sawyer Robbins (Hay House, hardback) – 218,919 copies

13. Eat Yourself Healthy by Jamie Oliver (Michael Joseph, hardback) – 217,520 copies

14. The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer (Gallery, paperback) – 210,116 copies

15. Cozy Cuties by Coco Wyo (Penguin, paperback) – 205,619 copies

16. In Too Deep by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Penguin, paperback) – 204,538 copies

17. Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros (Piatkus, paperback) – 201,474 copies

18. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Penguin, paperback) – 193,640 copies

19. The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden (Little, Brown, paperback) – 191,804 copies

20. You Are Here by David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton, paperback) – 187,010 copies

Richard Osman, Kate Mosse and Sir Philip Pullman are among authors calling for all babies to automatically receive a library card at birth. The proposal, put forward by the thinktank Cultural Policy Unit (CPU), aims to make public library membership a national birthright and encourage a culture of reading and learning in the early stages of childhood through a National Library Card.

“The idea behind a National Library Card is very simple,” Alison Cole, director at the CPU, said. “Access to knowledge and culture should be a birthright, not a postcode lottery. By giving every child an automatic library card from birth, together with a programme of activities and engagement, we make libraries part of the fabric of everyday life.”

A November report by the National Literacy Trust found a socioeconomic gap in book ownership. “Far fewer” children and young people who receive free school meals report having a book of their own compared with their peers, making public libraries that offer free access to books crucial for tackling social inequality.

Public libraries are “engines of social mobility with a critical role in supporting children and families from birth”, said Isobel Hunter, chief executive of Libraries Connected. She added that investment is key, and offers long-term benefits to closing opportunity gaps in communities.

“Reading from the earliest days supports bonding, tackles inequalities, and boosts development,” added Annie Crombie, co-CEO of BookTrust.

Author Kate Mosse said that universal access to local libraries “will make an enormous difference to young parents who maybe don’t have a support network near them”.

Cole added that the “support of authors like Richard Osman and Kate Mosse really matters, as does Sir Philip Pullman’s enthusiasm for a policy that is full of optimism. They understand better than anyone that readers are made early, and that libraries are where curiosity, confidence – as well as a love of stories – begins. Their backing reflects a growing consensus that if we’re serious about literacy and social mobility, we have to start from birth – and libraries are a place of infinite possibilities.”

The National Library Card initiative would also help teach children how to confidently navigate an increasingly digital world in an era of artificial intelligence, said the CPU. It has incorporated a library journey timeline in its proposal that includes suggestions of services for stages of child development, from birth to 18 years, to ensure that libraries are “lifelong tools for learning, creativity, cultural experiences and social mobility”.

Richard Ayoade, Guy Jenkin, Sandi Toksvig and Nussaibah Younis are among eight authors in the running to have a pig named after their novel in this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.

The award aims to highlight the funniest novel of the past 12 months, one which best evokes the witty spirit of the English writer PG Wodehouse. This year’s shortlist features a “delightful mix of comedies” from “darkest satire and period farce to lightest humour,” said the chair of the judges and Hay festival co-founder Peter Florence.

Shortlisted for The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, Ayoade’s debut is narrated by his alter ego, who wants to save his doppelganger, the playwright Harauld Hughes, from obscurity. “A pitch-perfect literary parody, packed with deft wordplay and lines that made me laugh aloud on almost every page. Ayoade has an instinctive ear for the comic possibilities of language,” said literary critic and judge Stephanie Merritt.

Younis made the shortlist for her debut novel Fundamentally, which was also shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. It follows a heartbroken academic, Nadia, who accepts a UN job offer in Iraq where she is tasked with rehabilitating Islamic State women. There she forms a friendship with a feisty east Londoner, who joined Islamic State at just 15.

Friendship is also a theme of Rosanna Pike’s novel A Little Trickerie, in which vagabond Tibb Ingleby travels through medieval England and with new-found friends conjures a hoax.

The winner of this year’s prize will be announced at a reception in London on 1 December and, as well as having a pig named after their winning book, they will be awarded a complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection and Bollinger champagne.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the award, this year’s ceremony will also feature the announcement of the Vintage Bollinger prize, a winner-of-winners to be selected from the previous 25 recipients. The prize will be judged by presenter Claudia Winkleman, comedians Sindhu Vee and Tatty Macleod, Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant and Florence.

Another title shortlisted for the regular award, The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, is about a family in crisis: Elizabeth lives with her Islamic law-breaking granddaughter in Tehran, while her daughters are disillusioned by life in America. “I found myself lost in this beautifully written novel and laughing as much as I wept,” said comedian Pippa Evans, another judge on the panel. “Multi-generational stories are rich in hilarious moments as we watch generations clash with the ideas that came before.”

Also set in America is Alexander Sammartino’s book Last Acts. David Rizzo, the owner of a failing firearms store, uses his son’s near fatal overdose to create a TV advert.

Joining Florence, Merritt and Evans on this year’s judging panel is vice-chair of the University of Wales and chair of Rewilding Britain Justin Albert and Everyman’s Library publisher David Campbell.

Outnumbered co-writer Guy Jenkin is shortlisted for Murder Most Foul, set in 1593, which follows the relationship between Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, and the rumours that swirl after Marlowe’s death about the Bard’s culpability. The novel is “a brilliantly subversive romp – razor-sharp, darkly funny, and utterly Wodehousian in its wit and mischief”, said Albert.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Toksvig made the list for Friends of Dorothy, following a young couple who buy their first house before discovering that the previous owner, 80-year-old Dorothy, does not plan to leave.

Completing the list is Kate Greathead with The Book of George, a comic tale of a forgetful, hapless man named George and his long-suffering girlfriend.

Previous winners include bestselling novelists Percival Everett, Bob Mortimer and Helen Fielding. Last year’s winner was Ferdia Lennon for his debut novel Glorious Exploits.

The shortlist was chosen from a record 107 submissions, published between 1 June 2024 and 31 May 2025.

Some years ago, a colleague on the Irish Times took the columnist Nuala O’Faolain to lunch. Nuala was famous, and feared, as a controversialist who specialised in attacking popular pieties, unless it was the pietests who were under attack, in which case she would spring immediately to their defence.

The pair had hardly finished their starters when the colleague, who had been in newspapers long enough to know better, heard himself asking Nuala how she managed to have so many opinions, enough to fill 52 columns yearly, as well as the odd special assignment. Nuala, cutlery suspended in mid-air, looked at him incredulously and said: “What are you talking about? I haven’t any opinions – I’m a journalist.”

Richard Evans, although a former newsman himself, does not seem to have grasped the first commandment in the journalist’s catechism: stop at nothing in pursuit of a story. His subject, George Ward Price, certainly adhered to it. Dubbed by Ernest Hemingway “the Monocled Prince of the Press”, he was one of the most successful and most famous journalists of his time. Born in 1886, the son of a clergyman, he lived for 75 years, and died largely forgotten but extremely rich, leaving more than £125,000 in his will, “at a time when”, Evans writes, “the average annual UK salary was around £1,000”.

When Ward Price was at school, a friend said of him that his ambition was to be either “a bishop, or on the staff of the Daily Mail”. He hearkened to the latter calling, and quickly became the Mail’s star journo, producing scoop after scoop and leaving the competition stumbling in his wake. His greatest triumphs came in the 1930s, when he courted the Nazis zealously, in particular Hitler, who in Linz, on the evening after the German annexation of Austria, “greeted him with a smile. ‘Well, Ward Price,’ he said. ‘Always there!’”

Ward Price’s reporting came in for serious criticism, including from Winston Churchill, who declared on meeting him: “I see that you’ve been over in Germany again, shaking the bloodstained hands of your Nazi friends.” In his autobiography, Extra-Special Correspondent, published in 1957, Ward Price claimed that he “reported his [Hitler’s] statements accurately, leaving British newspaper readers to form their own opinion of their worth”. For other commentators, he was merely the “international mouthpiece for the Duce and for the Führer”.

In any case, early on in his book, Evans produces a piece of evidence that, taken at face value, unequivocally condemns the Mail’s preeminent reporter. Six months after the Anschluss, and following Neville Chamberlain’s peace mission to Germany, Ward Price spent some days at Hitler’s holiday retreat in the Bavarian Alps. Here he had exclusive access to the Nazi leader in all his moods, from the avuncular to the manic. At the end of his stay, as Evans writes, Ward Price “came down from the mountain with the biggest story in the world”.

That story was of Hitler’s determination to take over the Czech Sudetenland, and by implication, his plans for further, wider conquests. However, the piece that appeared in the Mail seems to have been a tempered version of what Ward Price had written. And who did the tempering? Joseph Goebbels, who was at Berchtesgaden at the time, wrote in his diary: “He [Hitler] is still revising the interview by Ward Price, which has turned out very well. It was somewhat too effusive.”

Evans makes surprisingly little of this explosive snippet, yet it is the smoking gun at the heart of his book. If Ward Price did allow Hitler to tone down what he had recorded, it would have been a total betrayal of himself as a journalist. Securing the “biggest story in the world” was possible only through an extraordinary act of malpractice. It is one thing to tell yourself you have no opinions, are merely an accurate chronicler – it is quite another to permit your subject to burnish his own image. When your subject is Hitler, it is wickedness itself.

Richard Flanagan, 63, lives in Tasmania, his birthplace. His sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which drew on his father’s experience as a Japanese prisoner of war, won the 2014 Booker prize and is about to become a TV series starring Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi. His latest book, Question 7, is on the shortlist of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction (to be awarded on 19 November), having also been shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina Étranger, a prize for novels. For the Spectator, it “uses an eccentric toolkit – part memoir, part history, part fictional imagining – to produce a book quite unlike anything else”; for Peter Carey, it “may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years”.

How do you feel about Question 7 being up for a fiction prize as well as a nonfiction prize?
Delighted. Labels are for jam jars.

What led you to write it?
A mistaken diagnosis of early onset dementia in 2022. I was given at best 12 months before it would begin in earnest. In those 12 months I wrote the book. When done, I asked my editor if it showed any signs of cognitive collapse; if it did, I didn’t wish to see it published. She began laughing. The neurologist subsequently confirmed her opinion.

Which of the book’s many threads came first?
Once I had the idea of writing the book as a chain reaction that begins with Rebecca West kissing HG Wells and leads to 100,000 people dying in Hiroshima, my father living and me being born – once I understood that without that kiss, there would be no bomb and no me – then disparate things that had haunted me for so long fell into place. I thought much about my parents who, in a world they knew to be meaningless, nevertheless asserted an idea of love as their answer to the horrors out of which my island home is torn.

Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds is pivotal to the narrative. Do you remember the first time you read it?
I thought I knew the story – yet when I first read it, perhaps 20 years ago, I was staggered to learn in Wells’s introduction that it was inspired by the extermination of Aboriginal Tasmanians. It isn’t a hokey Edwardian set piece. It’s an indictment of English imperialism.

Are you a restless writer? Your books are similar to one another mainly in their difference …
I’m easily bored. And then there’s age. I seek forms that account not just for what’s lost but reflect what’s gained.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Were you inspired this time by the discursive turn that English-language fiction has taken since WG Sebald?
Fashions come and go. With this book, what mattered above all wasn’t literature, but life. During Covid, life for us all seemed on hold. The question I was left with was: do we wish to live, or are we content just to exist? And I think that question haunted many.

Do you think you’ll go back to writing novels of plot and character?
I am not sure if I will write again. Whatever impelled me for so long has left, for now at least. Perhaps I’m just happy to be in the company of friends and family.

What’s your role in the forthcoming TV adaptation of The Narrow Road to the Deep North?
Executive producer. I’m not interested in a literal act of fidelity to my novel. I wanted to get a director I respected [Justin Kurzel] and let him make his own work inspired by whatever he found in mine. I saw my job as supporting Justin.

The lead is Jacob Elordi. What did you make of Saltburn?
Saltburn is the one film of Jacob’s I haven’t watched. I wasn’t so enamoured of Oxford [where Flanagan was a Rhodes scholar in the 80s] as to be fascinated by its fictional representations.

That period in your life comes up in Question 7, where you encounter a thinly veiled Boris Johnson …
Few things exemplify the vacuity of 1980s Oxford better.

Question 7 also mentions that The Wind in the Willows was one of your favourite books as a boy. Why?
I think because of my mother reading it to me. She loved it and I loved her. We lived in a very remote, small mining village full of postwar refugees in the middle of a great rainforest, rain and rivers everywhere. The idea of a river joining very different people, of people having homes in the wild woods… it all seemed somehow familiar. She didn’t skimp the more difficult language or chapters – the mystery of it seemed the mystery of the world beyond.

From the very first sentence of Richard Flanagan’s 12th book, Question 7, the model for this extraordinary, hybrid work is clear. WG Sebald is there in the subject matter: the second world war and the ethics of mass bombing campaigns; the interweaving of personal and political history; the blending of truth, memory and a kind of hyper-real imagined past. Sebald is there in the deeper currents: a somewhat solitary, occasionally ridiculous middle-aged man seeking to come to terms with his place in the world, wrestling in particular with his complex love for a father whose own life was defined by his experiences in the war. It’s there even in the rhythms of the prose. The book begins like a Sebald tribute act, with its stateliness, its subclauses, its melancholy: “In the winter of 2012, against my better judgment and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing – much as I said they were – and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned.”

Question 7 is the story of Flanagan’s attempts to understand his parents, both of whom have recently died, and through them the strange contingency of his own life. His mother is presented as a warm, ambitious, eccentric figure, dragging the family up from hardscrabble poverty in rural Tasmania. Flanagan’s father’s wartime experience, first on the Death Railway, then in a prisoner of war camp, inspired his most celebrated book, the Booker prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Here, though, Flanagan seeks to present his father’s life in a different way, as an example of the absurd calculus and complex happenstance of existence. This is the reason for the book’s title, which refers to an obscure Chekhov story that asks something like the same questions. Can life be reduced to a series of equations? Are we all here as a result of the whims of chance? Specifically, in Flanagan’s case, what would have happened to his father had the atom bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima?

To shape his answer – an answer that encompasses not just the horrifying paradox of the atom bomb but also the power of literature to shape the world – Flanagan tells the story of a novel: HG Wells’s The World Set Free. In a series of wonderful, Edwardian-inflected chapters, he traces the writing of this book, composed in the Alps in the lead-up to the first world war when Wells was bouncing between affairs with Rebecca West and Elizabeth von Arnim. Flanagan shows how, in an otherwise mediocre and proselytising novel, Wells divined the monstrous implications of radioactivity, only recently discovered. Wells describes a weapon small enough to be carried in a bag but with sufficient “latent energy to wreck half a city”. It is the first literary representation of a nuclear chain reaction, the first time someone had imagined that this new source of energy might also be used to cause harm.

The World Set Free did not have many fans, but one of them was Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist (played by Máté Haumann in Oppenheimer) who, with his friend Albert Einstein, was integral in persuading Roosevelt to begin work on the Manhattan Project. Flanagan presents Szilard as a conflicted visionary, obsessed by the power of Wells’s (at that time fictional) bomb, realising too late the horror he has unleashed upon the world. Flanagan asks us to consider the possibility that without Wells, there would have been no Hiroshima. The World Set Free, Flanagan says, “destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them”.

There’s so much more in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir. There’s the genocide of Tasmania’s Indigenous peoples (and a series of links to HG Wells); there’s the author’s meeting with one of the prison guards who tortured his father; there’s a section at the end in which Flanagan describes his own brush with the capriciousness of existence: an almost fatal kayak accident that reads like 127 Hours. This book already comes laden with praise from its Australian publication – Peter Carey said it “may just be the most significant piece of Australian art in the last 100 years”. That it is a masterpiece is without question. Sebald himself would have been proud of the subtlety, the depth, the intensity of thought and feeling.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion