Question 7

Richard Flanagan’s creative non-fiction Question 7 (2023) is an exploration of Flanagan’s life and family history in Tasmania, Australia and its relationship to the development of the atomic bomb and the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. The complex text weaves together memoir, historical narrative, and historical fiction as Flanagan reflects on his history as a writer, the role of literature in shaping historical events, and his relationship to his parents through a series of poetically interconnected fragments.

Richard Flanagan is a writer of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including works of investigative journalism to raise socio-political awareness, such as Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry about the Atlantic salmon industry and its environmental impacts. He is best known for his Booker Prize winning 2014 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North about an Australian doctor held in a prisoner of war camp in Japan. Question 7 was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for excellence in nonfiction.

This guide uses and references the 2025 Vintage paperback edition of Question 7.

Content Warning: The source material features discussion of genocide, war crimes, antisemitism, enslavement, and anti-Aboriginal racism. Additionally, the source material references offensive language for Romani, Jewish, and Aboriginal people, which is replicated in this guide only in direct quotes of the source material.

Summary

Question 7 is divided into 10 parts that are further subdivided into chapters. In Part 1, Richard Flanagan describes his experiences traveling to Japan in 2012 to learn more about the prisoner of war camp at a coal mine where his father was forced into labor during World War II. There, he meets with a former camp guard named Mr. Sato to whom he is expected to offer his forgiveness on behalf of his father. Flanagan describes the events of August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese people. He describes how America’s development of the nuclear bomb was spurred on by a physicist named Leo Szilard who was inspired by the work of author H. G. Wells. Part 1 ends with a description of a meeting between a young firebrand named Rebecca West and a 46-year-old H. G. Wells, chronicling the beginning of their love affair.

In Part 2, Flanagan introduces his father, whom he describes as “an alone man” (45). His father did not talk a lot about his experience as a POW. His parents both prioritized love and family over money and ambition, which Flanagan attributes to the anticapitalism of generations of Tasmanians, like his grandmother Mate’s ancestors who came to Tasmania as convicts to work in the penal colony. Flanagan describes his experiences growing up with five brothers and sisters and his grandmother Mate in rural Tasmania.

In Part 3, Flanagan describes how H. G. Wells’s turbulent relationship with Rebecca West shaped the novel Wells was writing at the time, The World Set Free (1914). To get away from West, Wells went to the chateau of his mistress Elizabeth von Arnim in Switzerland, but kept in touch with West through letters. The resulting book was mediocre but presented the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse following the creation of the atomic bomb. Although the book was of middling quality, scientists and politicians were inspired by the potential of creating such a destructive weapon.

In Part 4, Flanagan reflects on his history and development as a writer. He describes doing press for his first novel, based on his experiences of almost dying during a kayaking accident, and feeling like a liar and a fraud. He reflects on his fragmented memory of his childhood and of his family. He recalls one event when his eldest brother told him he wanted a kayak during a mental breakdown, which inspired Flanagan to take up kayaking, even though later the brother claimed not to remember the comment.

In Part 5, Flanagan introduces Leo Szilard, a Jewish-Hungarian scientist and advocate who discovered the principle of the nuclear chain reaction used in the creation of the atomic bomb. Szilard was afraid that Germany would develop a nuclear bomb before the United States, and so he advocated for the United States to begin its own nuclear program. However, Szilard was devastated when the U.S. ultimately dropped an atomic bomb on Japan.

In Part 6, Flanagan describes moving to rural Rosebery, Tasmania as a child in 1963. He describes how the natural environment there has since been eroded and destroyed by industrialization. Flanagan decided to be a writer when he was four years old. However, as an young adult, while studying at Oxford University, he felt alienated by British expectations of history and literature which he felt did not apply to his experiences in Tasmania.

In Part 7, Flanagan describes returning to Rosebery with a BBC documentary crew to make a film about his life. He reflects on how life in Rosebery seems outside of the bounds of literature. Flanagan reminisces about his mother who was a strong, intense woman hemmed in by the expectations of the society in which she lived. Flanagan describes how his mother died surrounded by her family and friends in a nursing home. He reflects on how his parents’ lives embodied the love they felt for others.

In Part 8, Flanagan returns to the figure of Leo Szilard, who spent the years following the bombing of Hiroshima unsuccessfully advocating against nuclear weapons proliferation. Szilard wrote a story about his experiences called “My Trial as a War Criminal.” This work was read by Andrei Sakharov, leading scientist on the Soviet nuclear program, and it inspired Sakharov to become a dissident to speak out against the program. Flanagan notes that the captain of the airplane that bombed Hiroshima, Thomas Ferebee, took part in war crimes before and after the bombing that are less well known. Flanagan describes further his meetings in 2012 with former workers at the POW camp where his father was held. He feels discomfited by his interactions. Soon after he finished writing his book based on his father’s experiences and his research, his father died.

In Part 9, Flanagan uses H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) as a framework for understanding British colonialization and the Holocaust. In the novel, Martians invade Earth and wipe out humans. Flanagan characterizes the British colonialists as Martians who perpetuated a genocide on the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. He notes that this “Martian” attitude persists in Britain in the contemporary era based on his experiences as a student at the University of Oxford.

In Part 10, Flanagan describes in detail the kayaking accident in which he almost died when he was 21. He feels he died that day in the water and was traumatized afterward by the thought. It took him years to understand the experience well enough to “tell the story properly” (265).

In the Epilogue, Flanagan describes a childhood trip to the beach when he was afraid the sea would overtake them. As a young adult, Flanagan returned to the area with a greater understanding of the river and the sea as representative of inevitable change. Finally, after his time at Oxford, now a more mature adult, Flanagan visits the river again and resolves to become a writer.