It's rare that we hear a voice from Tasmania, let alone a voice as quirkily lyrical as Richard Flanagan's. In this elegiac book the narrator, Aljaz Cosini, sees not just his life but those of his ancestors flash before his eyes as he lies drowning beneath a waterfall on the Franklin River. Memories, some sweet but most bitterly self-recriminatory, wash over Aljaz in a torrent that chills his poor trapped bones even more than the merciless rapids on which he has worked for most of his life as a guide. Like the river which runs through it, Death of a River Guide is possessed of both a fierce, seething energy and a limpid, unexpected tranquillity.
By Arminta Wallace
