The Narrow Road To The Deep North: A Novel

"It took Richard Flanagan 12 years to write The Narrow Road to the Deep North — and it shows. The book has some of the most beautiful writing and plotting I’ve ever read. During World War II, Australian doctor Dorrigo Evans finds himself leading a few hundred inmates in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in then-Burma, building what would come to be known as the Death Railway. The details of the camp — the various diseases, the wasting away of prisoners — are often graphic, and because of that all the more real. But it’s the charting of Evan’s full life — his great love, his marriage, his infidelities — and of the side characters, including the Japanese, that makes this book so powerful."