Book Club Guide

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan · 2014 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Survival and what it requires — and what it leaves behind
Love as the counterforce to annihilation
The moral weight of the lucky — those who lived when others died

About this book

Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans survives as a prisoner of war building the Burma Death Railway, haunted by a love affair that began just before his capture. Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel is a meditation on love, memory, survival and the particular moral difficulty of having lived through something that others did not.

Published in 2013, The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Booker Prize in 2014. Flanagan's father was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway, and the novel draws on his testimony and on decades of research.

Discussion questions

Dorrigo Evans is haunted for his whole life by both the woman he loved before his capture and the men who died under his care. How does Flanagan weave these two forms of haunting together?
The novel gives us the perspectives of both Australian prisoners and their Japanese captors. What does this structural choice achieve — and how does it complicate the moral framework?
The Burma Death Railway is depicted with great physical specificity and horror. How does Flanagan prevent this from becoming sensational — and what does he ask the reader to do with the suffering?
The love story might seem like a conventional element in an unconventional war novel. Is it — or does Flanagan make it do more specific work?
The novel is titled after Matsuo Bashō's haiku diary. How does the Japanese literary tradition function in the novel — as irony, as counterpoint, or as something that complicates the moral landscape?