Shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize

What makes a hero? Richard Flanagan’s master work tells the story of one man’s reckoning with war and love

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. Dorrigo Evans is married to loyal, trusting Ella but he still takes mistresses. And he can’t shake his time as a POW on the Death Railway. Dorrigo was a surgeon, and a colonel -- the ‘Big Fella’. But Dorrigo is a war hero fully conscious of his own failings, and is haunted by what happened to his best mate, Darky Gardiner...

Life in the camp is hard, but at first it is not insane. The Diggers march by day and pursue amateur theatricals at night. Then the madness begins: work quotas rise, more rock to be shifted and the Japanese guards become increasingly sadistic.
Dorrigo retreats into his memories of a woman with a red camellia in her hair. Amy on the sand. Amy, hitching up her dress. His uncle’s wife, as it happens. ‘I’ll be back’ he says on the phone to Amy as his unit is mobilised, ‘When it’s over. For you Amy. And we’ll marry.’

Back in the shelter where the men take momentary rest – the jokes turn bitter. Rainy season sets in: muck and filth, one dirty rice ball a day that is food ration, and ugly deaths from cholera and infection. Jack Rainbow and Rabbit Hendricks burn on the pyre, and then Darky fails to fold his blanket correctly…

A final thin lie reaches Dorrigo at his lowest ebb. It will be many years before he learns the truth about Darky, about Amy. But for all of them on the Line – prisoners and captors – it is death that will give life, and love, its meaning.