Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan’s hybrid memoir, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction this week, isn’t a novel, although it’s been shortlisted for a fiction prize in France. It is inspired by one: HG Wells’s The World Set Free, which imagined the devastation of nuclear war. Flanagan sets out to understand his recently deceased parents. His father was a POW in Japan who only survived because the Americans bombed Hiroshima. His mother was warm and strong, holding the family together through hardscrabble poverty in rural Tasmania. This is a profoundly wise, genre-defying work exploring guilt, shame, personal accountability and historic atrocities. Flanagan meets the guard who terrorised his father’s camp; the guard, for whatever wretched reason of his own, gives him £20 to pass on to his father. “I felt powerless,” Flanagan writes on taking the money. “For what good was done, what wrong righted, what dead man resurrected, by giving offence?”