Wanting
Wanting
Book for September 2012
Group 2
One of our most inventive and important international literary voices, Richard Flanagan now delivers Wanting, a powerful and moving tale of colonialism, ambition, and the lusts and longings that make us human.
It is 1841. In the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, a barefoot aboriginal girl sits for a portrait in a red silk dress. She is Mathinna, the adopted daughter of the island’s governor, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, and the subject of a grand experiment in civilization—one that will determine whether science, Christianity, and reason can be imposed on savagery, impulse, and desire. Years later, somewhere in the Arctic, Sir John Franklin has disappeared with his crew and two ships on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. England is horrified by reports of cannibalism filtering back from search parties, no one more so than the most celebrated novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, for whom Franklin’s story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own life.
About the Author
Richard Flanagan
Richard Miller Flanagan, BA(Hons)(Tas) MLitt(Oxf) (born 1961) is a writer from Tasmania, Australia.

His first novel, Death of a River Guide (1997), is the tale of Aljaz Cosini, river guide, who lies drowning, reliving his life and the lives of his family and forebears. It was described by "The Times Literary Supplement" as ‘one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing’. His next book, The Sound of One Hand Clapping>Gould's Book of Fish (2001), Flanagan’s third novel, is based on the life of William Buelow Gould, a convict artist, and tells the tale of his love affair with a young black woman in 1828. It went on to win the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Flanagan has described these early novels as 'soul histories'. Flanagan’s fourth novel was The Unknown Terrorist (2006), which "The New York Times" called ‘stunning . . . a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world’. His fifth novel, Wanting (2008) tells two parallel stories: about the novelist Charles Dickens in England, and Mathinna, an Aboriginal orphan adopted by Sir John Franklin, the colonial governor of Van Diemen's Land, and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin. As well as being a New Yorker Book of the Year and Observer Book of the Year, it won the Queensland Premier's Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Prize and the Tasmania Book Prize.

His most recent book is a collection of non-fiction, And What Do You Do, Mr Gable? (2011).