Flanagan's triumph is to find poetry without any pity at all. 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 McGarth 'Beyond comparison. 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. As the day builds to its horrific climax, Dorrigo Evans battles and fails in his quest to save the lives of his fellow POWs, a man is. At its heart is one day in a Japanese slave labour camp in August 1943. 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a big, magnificent novel of passion and horror and tragic irony. Taking its title from 17th-century haiku poet Basho's travel journal, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about the impossibility of love. 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. Kinkei was the only remnant of that bygone era. In his record of that journey entitled Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), he pondered the lost glory of Hiraizumi, and noted how Mt.

A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love. Kinkei drew the attention of the poet Matsuo Bash (16441694) during his travels in northern Japan.

Deep road to the narrow north