Don’t get me wrong, this is not a manipulative tearjerker and you don’t need to read it with tissues, but there are moments… Seriously, I had to stop reading a few times on the bus to avoid actual tears. The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Richard FlanaganĪ book I selected to fill the Man Booker/Pulitzer Prize winner category from my 2015 Read Harder Challenge, this was one of those rarest of books – one that not only educated me or challenged me, but actually moved me. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. He did not understand how this had come to be, only that it had.įor an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. Somehow, they had assented to what was happening, they were keeping time with the drumming, and Dorrigo was first among them, the one who arrived too late and done too little and now somehow agreed with what was happening. Here were two hundred men watching three men destroying a man whom they all knew, and yet they did nothing.

Something was happening inside Dorrigo Evans as he watched. The Narrow Road To The Deep North – Richard Flanagan

Book the narrow road to the deep north