The Narrow Road is an extraordinary piece of writing and a high point in an already distinguished career. a magnificent achievement.’ – Katharine England, Adelaide Advertiser ‘A story of war and star-crossed lovers, the novel is also a profound meditation on life and time, memory and forgetting. The poetry is in the pity.’ Flanagan’s triumph is to find poetry without any pity at all.’ – Geordie Williamson, The Australian Wilfred Owen wrote of his Great War verse: ‘My subject is war, and the pity of war. It’s by far the best new novel I’ve read in ages.’ – Patrick McGrath Its scope, its themes and its people all seem to grow richer and deeper in significance with the progress of the story, as it moves to its extraordinary resolution. ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a big, magnificent novel of passion and horror and tragic irony. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier.

It was the basis for a film by NHK, the Japanese national.

A novel of the cruelty of war, tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.Īugust, 1943. On the Narrow Road to the Deep North was filmed by Channel 4 and WNET as Journey to a Lost Japan.

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