Flanagan’s novel may be brutal, but unlike Terzo and Anna – so ferociously determined 'to save their mother from her own wishes' – it is not wilfully cruel. at its best when it balances its vehemence with its beauty, when it leaves space for the reader to wander and wonder – eucalypt leaves swinging down like 'lazing scimitars' a moth thrumming its 'Persian rug' wings. What she does know is there is an intoxicating calm – a kind of existential grace – to be found at her mother’s bedside. Hailed on publication in Australia as Richard Flanagans greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm illuminating what remains when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope. Are her actions a ferocious form of love, sublimated guilt, or a fearful evasion of love’s most intimate and painful obligations? Anna does not know. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams follows Anna as she battles her mother’s decline, insisting on last-ditch therapies in the way only those with power and money can. And smouldering underneath it all is the red memory of last summer’s reign of fire. combines the moral righteousness of a fable, the wounded grief of a eulogy, and the fury of someone who still reads the news.
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