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Wanting
Wanting
Nov 10, 2025 3:57 AM

Author:Richard Flanagan

Wanting

FROM THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014

Mathinna, an Aboriginal girl from Van Diemen’s Land, is adopted by nineteenth-century explorer, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane. Franklin is confident that shining the light of reason on Mathinna will lift her out of savagery and desire. But when Franklin dies on an Arctic expedition, Lady Jane writes to Charles Dickens, asking him to defend Franklin’s reputation amid rumours of his crew lapsing into cannibalism.

Dickens responds by staging a play in which he takes the leading role as Franklin, his symbol of reason’s triumph, only to fall in love with an eighteen-year-old actress. As reason gives way to wanting, the frontier between civilisation and barbarity dissolves, and Mathinna, now a teenage prostitute, goes drinking on a fatal night.

Reviews

Exquisite

—— New Yorker

Fascinating

—— New York Times

Irresistibly good

—— The Times

Dazzling... A captivating tale of cruelty and disappointment

—— Washington Post

Richard Flanagan is a master

—— Guardian

A beautifully constructed fugue on desire and its denial

—— Times Literary Supplement

This is the best novel I have read this year or expect to read for several more... Wanting shakes us rudely from our stupors, wakes us up to history. There can be no author more passionate or unfettered than Flanagan

—— Sydney Morning Herald

A summary does little justice to the complexities and nuances of this dense and fascinating novel... There are moments of great power and lyricism in Wanting, not only in wild Tasmania but also in noisome London... The novel illustrates once again - with terrific brio and aplomb - how fictionalizing history and real people can pay great dividends

—— William Boyd , Scotsman

Light, mercurial... A novel of singular beauty and so vivid a grace it inspires strange elation as well as pity for the lost

—— Irish Times

Flanagan is a beautiful writer and Wanting is a beautiful and considered addition to his oeuvre

—— The Age

A thought-provoking, emotional drama.

—— Sunday Post

I’m a massive Dorothy Koomson fan, so I’ll be taking When I Was Invisible on holiday

—— Katie Fforde , Daily Mail, Summer Reads

Cancel the excursion to the ancient ruins and get poolside for this compelling story of love and forgiveness.

—— Sainsbury’s Magazine

A hard-hitting tale

—— Sun

Great heart

—— The Herald

Raw and emotional, this packs a punch

—— Fabulous

Koomson just gets better and better

—— Woman & Home

Tense and emotional with truly empathetic characters

—— My Weekly

A powerful story about friendship and forgiveness, fans of Dorothy Koomson’s novels will enjoy the clever twists and unexpected turns, which keep the reader enthralled

—— Candis

A powerful book … it’s always good to be thinking of a book long after you put it down

—— Woman’s Way (Ireland)

A beautiful and clever novel

—— The Culture Trip

A meditative cowboy yarn with a putative ecological message, it could not be more different from Williams’s [Stoner]; it is just as good

—— David Evans, 5 stars , Independent On Sunday

It is a sort of Dances with Buffaloes, and one of the most tense, gripping, tragic novels I have ever read

—— Giles Coren , The Times

Stoner...is a fine book but his western novel Butcher's Crossing is even better... Visceral, violent and chilling.

—— Barbara Taylor Bradford , Daily Mirror

A novel that turns upside down the expectations of the genre—and goes to war with a century of American triumphalism, a century of regeneration through violence, a century of senseless slaughter.

—— John Plotz , Guardian
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