‘Why at the beginning of things is there always light?’ So opens Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan’s elegiac, Booker Prize-winning 2013 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Dedicated to his father’s unimaginable suffering as a Japanese prisoner-of-war, forced under despicable conditions to forge the Thai-Burma railway during WWII, the book is mired in mud and blood. But even in the darkest places, light never completely dims. Pure energy, it simply changes form. With time itself captured in this eternal loop, the end is always near the beginning.
