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Sat 10 Oct 2009A subtle weaving of passion and despair
FICTION:Wanting, By Richard Flanagan, Atlantic, 252pp, £14.99
HISTORY HAS many stories; the huge ones absorbed into the communal consciousness and those tiny human tales that splinter into pieces of memory all too often lost. Sometimes though, these small stories are retrieved through a diary or a chance image, a half–remembered connection that leads on to another, or to several. Writers scan history and recorded fact, a chance remark, ever on the alert for the missing face, the life that holds an untold story. The gifted Tasmanian Richard Flanagan has followed one such face, one such life and created in Wantinga novel of singular beauty and so vivid a grace it inspires strange elation as well as pity for the lost.
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