The novel revolves around the life of physician Dorrigo Evans, a character modeled after war hero Edward “Weary” Dunlop. Richard Flanagan’s father was one of the lucky POWs who survived. Nearly 3,000 Australians were among those killed. Of those who perished, 90 percent were Asian, primarily Burmese and Malayans, but also Chinese, Tamils, Thais and Javanese. One in three prisoners’ lives was lost on that arch-brutal forced march. Yet there is only one stark, unrelenting and everlasting present - “the Line,” the 415-km-long Burma-Thailand railway that was built between June 1942 and October 1943 by more than 300,000 prisoners of war under the command of the Japanese. The time line of Richard Flanagan’s new novel, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” slips back and forth from prewar Tasmania, Melbourne and Adelaide to postwar Sydney, among other locations.
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