About this item
Highlights
- A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land, The Sound of One Hand Clapping was both critically acclaimed and a bestseller in Australia.
- Author(s): Richard Flanagan
- 432 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
The Australian Booksellers' Association Book of the Year begins in 1954, in Tasmania where Bojan Buloh brings his family to start a new life away from Slovenia's privations of war and refugee settlements. Bojan's wife abandons him to care for their three-year-old daughter Sonja alone. Sonja returns to Tasmania 35 years later, and to a father haunted by memories of the war and other recent horrors.Book Synopsis
A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land, The Sound of One Hand Clapping was both critically acclaimed and a bestseller in Australia. Recognized with the Australian Booksellers' Book of the Year Award and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, it now introduces to an international readership a young Australian who is emerging as one of our most talented new storytellers.
In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her migrant Slovenian father was drunk, her mother Maria walked off into a blizzard, never to return. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the barbarism of an old world left behind, about the harshness of a new country, and the destiny of those in a land beyond hope who seek to redeem themselves through love.
Review Quotes
"Heart-wrenching and beautifully written . . . A rare and remarkable achievement . . . Flanagan blends a strong yet delicate psychological sensibility with . . . sharp, vivid, original prose." -Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Compelling . . . affecting . . . Flanagan has thoughtful things to say about history and the ordinary people whose lives are so powerfully affected by it." --The Washington Post Book World
"Masterful . . . Combining acuity with lyricism, Flanagan chronicles the insidious effects of war . . . [and] how the fragmented can be made whole again." --San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
"Flanagan is an accomplished ringmaster of despair and tenderness. Short chapters of almost unbearable tension hack out the pasts of Maria, Bojan, and Sonja against a backdrop of wind and rain. . . . Powerful and disturbing." --The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
"A book of immense beauty which holds within it love, grief, and a dissection of the anatomy of hurting that is haunting and unforgettable." --Canberra Times
"Like Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries, The Sound of One Hand Clapping achieves the difficult task of making clear and real the lives of those who normally stay hidden in history. From its wonderfully atmospheric opening to its touching conclusion, this is a heartbreaking story, beautifully told." --Literary Review (London)
"The voice of the novel is fierce and true, almost unbearable, as the narrative moves back and forth in time in relentless shards of light and dark. . . . An unforgettable novel which reaches out to a very wide readership." --Judges' Report for the Victorian Premier's 1998 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
"An epic tragedy . . . a passionately literary account of one of [Australia's] most formative experiences." --The Sunday Age (Melbourne)
"An immortal story of faith and hope, its loss and rebirth . . . [that] is destined to be a classic." --Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne)
"Heartbreaking . . . resonant . . . breathtaking . . . There are no villains or victims here, but complex characters damaged by their pasts and I couldn't help but be deeply enthralled and moved by their stories." --Independent on Sunday (London)
"Flanagan . . . breathes life into dark pockets of history. He underscores the terror and mystery of the landscape with a strange tenderness, a loving attention to the little rituals and memories that serve both to sustain and debilitate the people he writes about." --Weekend Australian (Sydney)
"Flanagan . . . give[s] voice to wordless passions, primal voices that whisper and echo through memory." --Sunday Times (Perth)