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First Person

Part of Vintage International

Author Richard Flanagan
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$17.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Mar 05, 2019 | 416 Pages | 978-0-525-43577-8
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  • English > Comparative Literature: Commonwealth Nations > Australian and Oceanic
  • About
  • Excerpt
  • Author
Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write the book.
 
But Ziggy swiftly proves almost impossible to work with: evasive, contradictory, and easily distracted by his still-running “business concerns”—which Kif worries may involve hiring hitmen from their shared office. Worse, Kif finds himself being pulled into an odd, hypnotic, and ever-closer orbit of all things Ziggy. As the deadline draws near, Kif becomes increasingly unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Ziggy is rewriting him—his life, his future, and the very nature of the truth.
 
By turns comic, compelling, and finally chilling, First Person is a haunting look at an age where fact is indistinguishable from fiction, and freedom is traded for a false idea of progress.

 
“A tour de force.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Enigmatic and mesmerizing.” —The New Yorker

“Flanagan writes with a searing truth. . . . First Person is studded with sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life.” —Financial Times (London) 

“Deeply compelling. . . . Flanagan writes with acute sensitivity.” —The New York Times Book Review

“At a time when our truth is daily contorted, debauched or ignored, we require Flanagan’s artful reminder of the wreckage caused by our unwillingness to say what happened.” —The Washington Post
 
“A sinister fable of identity exchange.” —The Seattle Times

“Brilliant. . . . This sonorous, blackly comic novel offers searing insight into our times.” —Booklist (starred review)
 
“[Flanagan] touches on genuine brilliance.” —The Australian
 
“Scathingly funny. . . . Also a profound and thought-provoking novel that explores the nature of truth, lies, and fiction.” —The Bookseller
1

Our first battle was birth. I wanted it in, he wanted it out. All that day and half of the next we argued. He said it had nothing to do with him. Later I began to see his point, but at the time it seemed bloody-mindedness and evidence of an inexplicable obstruction—as though he didn’t actually want any memoir ever written. Of course, he didn’t want a memoir written, but that wasn’t his point. Or the point. But I only realised this later, much later, when I came to fear that the beginning of that book was also the end of me.

Too late, in other words.

These days I content myself with reality TV. There is a void, a loneliness that aches and rattles. That frightens. That terrifies me that I should have lived and never did. Reality TV doesn’t have this effect on me.

Back then though, all this was confusing. It was feared by others that I might relapse into literature. By which I mean allegory, symbol, the tropes of time dancing; of books that didn’t have a particular beginning or end, or at least not in that order. By whom I mean the publisher, a man by the unexpected name of Gene Paley. He had been quite specific in this regard: I was to tell a simple story simply, and where it was not simple—when it dealt with the complexities of the spectacular crime—simplify, illustrate by way of anecdote, and never have a sentence that lingered longer than two lines.

It was whispered around the publishing house that Gene Paley was frightened of literature. And not without good reason. For one thing, it doesn’t sell. For another, it can fairly be said that it asks questions that it can’t answer. It astonishes people with themselves, which, on balance, is rarely a good thing. It reminds them that the business of life is failure, and that the failure to know this is true ignorance. Maybe there is transcendence in all this, or wisdom in some of it, but Gene Paley didn’t see himself in the transcendence game. Gene Paley was all for books telling you one or two things over and over again. But preferably only one.

Selling, Gene Paley would say, is telling.

I opened the manuscript again and re-read the opening lines.

On 17 May 1983, I signed my application letter for the position of Acting Safety Officer (supervisor) (Acting Class 4/5) at the Australian Safety Organisation, with two words, Siegfried Heidl, and my new life began.

Only much later did I discover that Siegfried Heidl had never existed until that day he signed the letter, so—strictly speaking—it was an honest account. But the past is always unpredictable and, as I was to learn, not his least gift as a con man was that he rarely lied.

Ziggy Heidl’s point of view was that his twelve-thousand-word manuscript—the thin pile of stacked papers on which he would frequently press down with his outstretched hand as if it were a basketball to be bounced and put back into play—said everything that anyone would ever be interested in reading about Ziggy Heidl. My job as a writer, he went on, was simply to sharpen his sentences, and perhaps elaborate here and there a little on his account.

He said this, as he said so much else, with such belief, with such confidence and such conviction, that I found it very difficult to point out, as I had to, that his manuscript made no mention of his childhood, his parents or even, for that matter, his year of birth. His reply has remained with me, even after all these years.

A life isn’t an onion to be peeled, a palimpsest to be scraped back to some original, truer meaning. It’s an invention that never ends.

And when I must have looked struck by his elaborate turn of phrase, Heidl added, as if giving directions to a public toilet: Tebbe. It’s one of his aphorisms.

What he lacked in facts, he made up for with an understated conviction; and what he lacked in conviction he made up for with facts, albeit mostly invented, and rendered all the more plausible because they were so lightly thrown up from an unexpected angle.

The great German installationist, Heidl said. Tomas Tebbe.

I had no idea what a palimpsest might be. Or who Tebbe was, or what an installationist did, or was, and said so. Heidl made no reply. Maybe, as he told me another time, we take from our past and the past of others to make ourselves anew, and the something new is our memory too. Tebbe, whom I only read many years later, put it best: It may be someone else’s blood soaking into the dust, he wrote, but I am that dust.

I looked up.

Out of interest, I said, whereabouts in Germany did you grow up?

Germany? Ziggy Heidl said, looking out the window. I never went there until I was twenty-six. I told you. I grew up in South Australia.

Your accent is German.

Roger that, Ziggy Heidl said. And when he turned his fleshy face back to me I tried not to stare at the small muscle in his otherwise puffy cheek that twitched when he smiled, a knot of tautness amidst the slackness, a single tight muscle pulsing in and out.

I know it’s odd, but there you are—I grew up with German-speaking parents and no one to play with. But I was happy. Write that.

He was smiling.

His smile: an undertow of sinister complicity.

What? I said.

That.

What?

Write: I was happy.

That terrible smile. That twitching cheek.

Boom-boom, it silently went. Boom-boom.


2

We were working in a publishing executive’s corner office in a publishing company’s headquarters in Port Melbourne. Perhaps it had been the office of an editorial director or a sales manager, recently retired or lately sacked. Who knows? We were never told, but the office made Ziggy Heidl feel important and that was important, and if I felt embarrassed, that wasn’t. It was 1992, that time so close and now so far away when publishing executives still had such rooms and liquor cabinets; before Amazon and e-books; before phrases like granular analytics, customer fulfilment, and supply chain alignment had connected like tightening coils in a hangman’s noose; before the relentless rise of property values and the collapse of publishing saw publishers’ offices morph into abattoir-like assembly lines, where all staff sat cheek by jowl at long benches reminiscent of, say, a Red Army canteen in Kabul, circa 1979.

And like the Red Army then, publishing was entering a crisis of stagnation not yet understood as either a crisis or as terminal. And beneath where the publishing people sat were so many little holes being bored by redundancies slowly coming together into one large sink hole through which, a few years hence, the several floors of the publishing house would suddenly and unexpectedly fall until they landed with a crash and compressed into just one floor. Then that floor, in turn, would begin to shrink as a rising sea of start-ups, finance companies and net businesses flooded over the publisher’s office space—an encroaching ocean of disruption—until the floor was now only half a floor, and on that vanishing island books were now only content and writers only content providers, sandbag fillers, but of an ever lower and lower caste, if such a thing were possible. All of which may suggest I write with some nostalgia, that the Port Melbourne office had charm or character.

I don’t.

It didn’t.

If it was bookcase lined, the bookcases were, on closer examination, like the world of publishing then, dispiriting. The shelving was particleboard covered with a hokey teak veneer, an uncomfortably faecal brown, more plasticised than varnished. And the books! The books that house—the then mighty Schlegel TransPacific (or as it was variously known, TransPac or STP)—published were the only books on those shelves. Books on chocolate, gardening, furniture, military history, tired celebrities; tedious memoirs and pulp novels—a small part of the profits from which paid for the publication of the few books that I thought books were—novels, essays, poems, stories—none of which lived on those glossy shelves. In addition to these and the cookbooks, pictorials, and reference books that still had a market, were the collected works of Jez Dempster, each Jez Dempster tome a cinder block blinged with the words JEZ DEMPSTER picked out in great gold lettering. What junk they were. How dispiriting they seemed. It was my first intimation that my idea of books, of writing, was a very small and largely unsuccessful subset of what at STP was known—in a cod-craft mystery-like way—as the trade.

The trade explained all things. While phrases such as “that’s how it is in the trade” or “the trade’s tight” told you nothing, they were understood to explain everything. And from my first day I understood that the trade somehow thought my telling of Heidl’s story was far more real a book than the real book I had until that time thought I had been writing, that real book being my own unfinished first novel.

This made no sense to me, but then the trade made no sense. It made no sense, for example, that Heidl’s memoirs were—for reasons I never could divine—secret. No one was meant to know at the publishing house, other than the handful working with us on the book—Gene Paley himself, though as publisher he left most of the work to the editor, Pia Carnevale, and one or two others. We were to tell everyone else we were co-editing an anthology of mediaeval Westphalian folk verse. I am not sure whose lie this was—Ziggy Heidl’s or Gene Paley’s then, or mine later—but it was as impressive as it was ludicrous. Why such a project would be undertaken within the house was, to my knowledge, never questioned. In a line of work full of perplexity, it was just one more oddity—but wasn’t that just how it was in the trade?

The furniture matched the tone of shoddy bombast—the executive’s faux Edwardian Laminex desk behind which Ziggy Heidl made his unceasing calls was too big, while the conference table at which I worked was too small for its real purpose of hosting meetings. The slightly soiled tub chairs in which we sat were upholstered in a nylon jacquard beset by a salmon and grey weave. When your fingers touched the fabric, it felt half-melted. The tormented colouring for no good reason always put me in mind of a Francis Bacon painting. I felt as if I were sitting in a muted scream.


3

Gene would like to see you, Kif, said a young woman at our office door. Needs you to sign a contract.

Gene Paley wanted no such thing—I’d signed my contract on the very first day already so long ago it was hard to believe it had been only Monday and it was now just Wednesday. Gene Paley, I knew, wanted to know how it was going.

Slowly, I said as I stood before Gene Paley in his office suite, while he stared down at tractor feed spreadsheets papering his desk. He just won’t give . . . detail.

Early life?

Vague stories about being born in a remote South Australian mining town called Jaggamyurra to German parents.

That’s it? Gene Paley said, still not looking up.

More or less.

Mmm.

Mostly less.

The con? As I was saying, he’s not a criminal celebrity for no reason. Seven hundred million dollars. It’s the biggest con job in Australian history. Has he explained how he did it?

Vaguely.

CIA?

Even vaguer.

Mmm, Gene Paley said and fell silent. Much of his conversation was punctuated with this slight downward falling murmur, as if every sentence were a judgement of failure. That, or the repetition of the phrase, As I was saying. His whole manner of speech was unusual, clipped sentences delivered quickly then slowly, such that he often sounded like a dying telex machine.

Good—, I said, but I could hear myself faltering.

On one of the spreadsheets, as wide as a small suburban road, Gene Paley made some precise marks, the wet black ink of his fountain pen vivid against the pale blue and white striped paper and ash blur of dot matrix printed numbers.

Good stories, I said. Just a little . . .

Vague?

Vague? Possibly.

As I was saying, you can write, Gene Paley said, eyes continuing to track the numbers arrayed below. But we need him to talk.

His eyes were oddly hooded, and that, and his small face, his beak of a nose, the suggestion of a powdery odour, the sense he might bite deeply and unexpectedly, all put me in mind of Suzy’s pet Indian ringneck parrot that missed no opportunity to bite me.

I need him to tell me something, I said. He’s—he’s just not interested in the book.

Gene Paley raised his eyes and caught mine with an unforgiving stare.

Mmm, he said, and with a quizzical gesture he held out at arm’s length his oversize fountain pen, as elaborate and nonsensical as a piece of chromed agricultural pipe, and dropped it on the several kilometres of numbers on the spreadsheets below. Decades of living through numbers such as these—the numbers printed, the numbers sold in, the numbers sold through, returned, and remaindered, the numbers he gave away as margin to booksellers, the numbers he lied about to other publishers and journalists, hellish real numbers, dreamt-of numbers, true numbers, false numbers, numbers lost to rapacious book chains, numbers clawed back off witless authors and vainglorious agents, the despair and beauty and sheer alchemy of numbers—their numbers, our numbers, bad numbers, good numbers, even, for God’s sake, numbers on numbers—all these innumerable numbers had over time honed in Gene Paley a sensitivity so great it verged on a sixth sense: to the possibility of profit and the terror of loss. And that sense was even then twitching with concern, perhaps fear.

Your contract is not just to write, he said, his voice still kindly but somehow firmer—somehow resolute. It is to write with him for us. Your job is to make him talk. Without him talking there is no book. Without a book at the end of six weeks, there is no money for you. None. No. Yes?

No, I replied. Yes.

No, Gene Paley said. None.

Yes, I replied. No.

As he talked, Gene Paley folded the spreadsheets into a neat rectangular mound, stood up, and took off his shirt without shame or concern to reveal a white singlet, slack on his scrawny white body.

They say there are only three rules for writing a book, Gene Paley said in what felt an anecdote greasy with retelling. Only no one can remember what they are.
Copyright © 2018 by Richard Flanagan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© Joel Saget
RICHARD FLANAGAN's seven novels have received numerous honours and are published in forty-two countries. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize for Gould's Book of Fish and the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. He lives in Tasmania. View titles by Richard Flanagan

About

Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write the book.
 
But Ziggy swiftly proves almost impossible to work with: evasive, contradictory, and easily distracted by his still-running “business concerns”—which Kif worries may involve hiring hitmen from their shared office. Worse, Kif finds himself being pulled into an odd, hypnotic, and ever-closer orbit of all things Ziggy. As the deadline draws near, Kif becomes increasingly unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Ziggy is rewriting him—his life, his future, and the very nature of the truth.
 
By turns comic, compelling, and finally chilling, First Person is a haunting look at an age where fact is indistinguishable from fiction, and freedom is traded for a false idea of progress.

 
“A tour de force.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Enigmatic and mesmerizing.” —The New Yorker

“Flanagan writes with a searing truth. . . . First Person is studded with sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life.” —Financial Times (London) 

“Deeply compelling. . . . Flanagan writes with acute sensitivity.” —The New York Times Book Review

“At a time when our truth is daily contorted, debauched or ignored, we require Flanagan’s artful reminder of the wreckage caused by our unwillingness to say what happened.” —The Washington Post
 
“A sinister fable of identity exchange.” —The Seattle Times

“Brilliant. . . . This sonorous, blackly comic novel offers searing insight into our times.” —Booklist (starred review)
 
“[Flanagan] touches on genuine brilliance.” —The Australian
 
“Scathingly funny. . . . Also a profound and thought-provoking novel that explores the nature of truth, lies, and fiction.” —The Bookseller

Excerpt

1

Our first battle was birth. I wanted it in, he wanted it out. All that day and half of the next we argued. He said it had nothing to do with him. Later I began to see his point, but at the time it seemed bloody-mindedness and evidence of an inexplicable obstruction—as though he didn’t actually want any memoir ever written. Of course, he didn’t want a memoir written, but that wasn’t his point. Or the point. But I only realised this later, much later, when I came to fear that the beginning of that book was also the end of me.

Too late, in other words.

These days I content myself with reality TV. There is a void, a loneliness that aches and rattles. That frightens. That terrifies me that I should have lived and never did. Reality TV doesn’t have this effect on me.

Back then though, all this was confusing. It was feared by others that I might relapse into literature. By which I mean allegory, symbol, the tropes of time dancing; of books that didn’t have a particular beginning or end, or at least not in that order. By whom I mean the publisher, a man by the unexpected name of Gene Paley. He had been quite specific in this regard: I was to tell a simple story simply, and where it was not simple—when it dealt with the complexities of the spectacular crime—simplify, illustrate by way of anecdote, and never have a sentence that lingered longer than two lines.

It was whispered around the publishing house that Gene Paley was frightened of literature. And not without good reason. For one thing, it doesn’t sell. For another, it can fairly be said that it asks questions that it can’t answer. It astonishes people with themselves, which, on balance, is rarely a good thing. It reminds them that the business of life is failure, and that the failure to know this is true ignorance. Maybe there is transcendence in all this, or wisdom in some of it, but Gene Paley didn’t see himself in the transcendence game. Gene Paley was all for books telling you one or two things over and over again. But preferably only one.

Selling, Gene Paley would say, is telling.

I opened the manuscript again and re-read the opening lines.

On 17 May 1983, I signed my application letter for the position of Acting Safety Officer (supervisor) (Acting Class 4/5) at the Australian Safety Organisation, with two words, Siegfried Heidl, and my new life began.

Only much later did I discover that Siegfried Heidl had never existed until that day he signed the letter, so—strictly speaking—it was an honest account. But the past is always unpredictable and, as I was to learn, not his least gift as a con man was that he rarely lied.

Ziggy Heidl’s point of view was that his twelve-thousand-word manuscript—the thin pile of stacked papers on which he would frequently press down with his outstretched hand as if it were a basketball to be bounced and put back into play—said everything that anyone would ever be interested in reading about Ziggy Heidl. My job as a writer, he went on, was simply to sharpen his sentences, and perhaps elaborate here and there a little on his account.

He said this, as he said so much else, with such belief, with such confidence and such conviction, that I found it very difficult to point out, as I had to, that his manuscript made no mention of his childhood, his parents or even, for that matter, his year of birth. His reply has remained with me, even after all these years.

A life isn’t an onion to be peeled, a palimpsest to be scraped back to some original, truer meaning. It’s an invention that never ends.

And when I must have looked struck by his elaborate turn of phrase, Heidl added, as if giving directions to a public toilet: Tebbe. It’s one of his aphorisms.

What he lacked in facts, he made up for with an understated conviction; and what he lacked in conviction he made up for with facts, albeit mostly invented, and rendered all the more plausible because they were so lightly thrown up from an unexpected angle.

The great German installationist, Heidl said. Tomas Tebbe.

I had no idea what a palimpsest might be. Or who Tebbe was, or what an installationist did, or was, and said so. Heidl made no reply. Maybe, as he told me another time, we take from our past and the past of others to make ourselves anew, and the something new is our memory too. Tebbe, whom I only read many years later, put it best: It may be someone else’s blood soaking into the dust, he wrote, but I am that dust.

I looked up.

Out of interest, I said, whereabouts in Germany did you grow up?

Germany? Ziggy Heidl said, looking out the window. I never went there until I was twenty-six. I told you. I grew up in South Australia.

Your accent is German.

Roger that, Ziggy Heidl said. And when he turned his fleshy face back to me I tried not to stare at the small muscle in his otherwise puffy cheek that twitched when he smiled, a knot of tautness amidst the slackness, a single tight muscle pulsing in and out.

I know it’s odd, but there you are—I grew up with German-speaking parents and no one to play with. But I was happy. Write that.

He was smiling.

His smile: an undertow of sinister complicity.

What? I said.

That.

What?

Write: I was happy.

That terrible smile. That twitching cheek.

Boom-boom, it silently went. Boom-boom.


2

We were working in a publishing executive’s corner office in a publishing company’s headquarters in Port Melbourne. Perhaps it had been the office of an editorial director or a sales manager, recently retired or lately sacked. Who knows? We were never told, but the office made Ziggy Heidl feel important and that was important, and if I felt embarrassed, that wasn’t. It was 1992, that time so close and now so far away when publishing executives still had such rooms and liquor cabinets; before Amazon and e-books; before phrases like granular analytics, customer fulfilment, and supply chain alignment had connected like tightening coils in a hangman’s noose; before the relentless rise of property values and the collapse of publishing saw publishers’ offices morph into abattoir-like assembly lines, where all staff sat cheek by jowl at long benches reminiscent of, say, a Red Army canteen in Kabul, circa 1979.

And like the Red Army then, publishing was entering a crisis of stagnation not yet understood as either a crisis or as terminal. And beneath where the publishing people sat were so many little holes being bored by redundancies slowly coming together into one large sink hole through which, a few years hence, the several floors of the publishing house would suddenly and unexpectedly fall until they landed with a crash and compressed into just one floor. Then that floor, in turn, would begin to shrink as a rising sea of start-ups, finance companies and net businesses flooded over the publisher’s office space—an encroaching ocean of disruption—until the floor was now only half a floor, and on that vanishing island books were now only content and writers only content providers, sandbag fillers, but of an ever lower and lower caste, if such a thing were possible. All of which may suggest I write with some nostalgia, that the Port Melbourne office had charm or character.

I don’t.

It didn’t.

If it was bookcase lined, the bookcases were, on closer examination, like the world of publishing then, dispiriting. The shelving was particleboard covered with a hokey teak veneer, an uncomfortably faecal brown, more plasticised than varnished. And the books! The books that house—the then mighty Schlegel TransPacific (or as it was variously known, TransPac or STP)—published were the only books on those shelves. Books on chocolate, gardening, furniture, military history, tired celebrities; tedious memoirs and pulp novels—a small part of the profits from which paid for the publication of the few books that I thought books were—novels, essays, poems, stories—none of which lived on those glossy shelves. In addition to these and the cookbooks, pictorials, and reference books that still had a market, were the collected works of Jez Dempster, each Jez Dempster tome a cinder block blinged with the words JEZ DEMPSTER picked out in great gold lettering. What junk they were. How dispiriting they seemed. It was my first intimation that my idea of books, of writing, was a very small and largely unsuccessful subset of what at STP was known—in a cod-craft mystery-like way—as the trade.

The trade explained all things. While phrases such as “that’s how it is in the trade” or “the trade’s tight” told you nothing, they were understood to explain everything. And from my first day I understood that the trade somehow thought my telling of Heidl’s story was far more real a book than the real book I had until that time thought I had been writing, that real book being my own unfinished first novel.

This made no sense to me, but then the trade made no sense. It made no sense, for example, that Heidl’s memoirs were—for reasons I never could divine—secret. No one was meant to know at the publishing house, other than the handful working with us on the book—Gene Paley himself, though as publisher he left most of the work to the editor, Pia Carnevale, and one or two others. We were to tell everyone else we were co-editing an anthology of mediaeval Westphalian folk verse. I am not sure whose lie this was—Ziggy Heidl’s or Gene Paley’s then, or mine later—but it was as impressive as it was ludicrous. Why such a project would be undertaken within the house was, to my knowledge, never questioned. In a line of work full of perplexity, it was just one more oddity—but wasn’t that just how it was in the trade?

The furniture matched the tone of shoddy bombast—the executive’s faux Edwardian Laminex desk behind which Ziggy Heidl made his unceasing calls was too big, while the conference table at which I worked was too small for its real purpose of hosting meetings. The slightly soiled tub chairs in which we sat were upholstered in a nylon jacquard beset by a salmon and grey weave. When your fingers touched the fabric, it felt half-melted. The tormented colouring for no good reason always put me in mind of a Francis Bacon painting. I felt as if I were sitting in a muted scream.


3

Gene would like to see you, Kif, said a young woman at our office door. Needs you to sign a contract.

Gene Paley wanted no such thing—I’d signed my contract on the very first day already so long ago it was hard to believe it had been only Monday and it was now just Wednesday. Gene Paley, I knew, wanted to know how it was going.

Slowly, I said as I stood before Gene Paley in his office suite, while he stared down at tractor feed spreadsheets papering his desk. He just won’t give . . . detail.

Early life?

Vague stories about being born in a remote South Australian mining town called Jaggamyurra to German parents.

That’s it? Gene Paley said, still not looking up.

More or less.

Mmm.

Mostly less.

The con? As I was saying, he’s not a criminal celebrity for no reason. Seven hundred million dollars. It’s the biggest con job in Australian history. Has he explained how he did it?

Vaguely.

CIA?

Even vaguer.

Mmm, Gene Paley said and fell silent. Much of his conversation was punctuated with this slight downward falling murmur, as if every sentence were a judgement of failure. That, or the repetition of the phrase, As I was saying. His whole manner of speech was unusual, clipped sentences delivered quickly then slowly, such that he often sounded like a dying telex machine.

Good—, I said, but I could hear myself faltering.

On one of the spreadsheets, as wide as a small suburban road, Gene Paley made some precise marks, the wet black ink of his fountain pen vivid against the pale blue and white striped paper and ash blur of dot matrix printed numbers.

Good stories, I said. Just a little . . .

Vague?

Vague? Possibly.

As I was saying, you can write, Gene Paley said, eyes continuing to track the numbers arrayed below. But we need him to talk.

His eyes were oddly hooded, and that, and his small face, his beak of a nose, the suggestion of a powdery odour, the sense he might bite deeply and unexpectedly, all put me in mind of Suzy’s pet Indian ringneck parrot that missed no opportunity to bite me.

I need him to tell me something, I said. He’s—he’s just not interested in the book.

Gene Paley raised his eyes and caught mine with an unforgiving stare.

Mmm, he said, and with a quizzical gesture he held out at arm’s length his oversize fountain pen, as elaborate and nonsensical as a piece of chromed agricultural pipe, and dropped it on the several kilometres of numbers on the spreadsheets below. Decades of living through numbers such as these—the numbers printed, the numbers sold in, the numbers sold through, returned, and remaindered, the numbers he gave away as margin to booksellers, the numbers he lied about to other publishers and journalists, hellish real numbers, dreamt-of numbers, true numbers, false numbers, numbers lost to rapacious book chains, numbers clawed back off witless authors and vainglorious agents, the despair and beauty and sheer alchemy of numbers—their numbers, our numbers, bad numbers, good numbers, even, for God’s sake, numbers on numbers—all these innumerable numbers had over time honed in Gene Paley a sensitivity so great it verged on a sixth sense: to the possibility of profit and the terror of loss. And that sense was even then twitching with concern, perhaps fear.

Your contract is not just to write, he said, his voice still kindly but somehow firmer—somehow resolute. It is to write with him for us. Your job is to make him talk. Without him talking there is no book. Without a book at the end of six weeks, there is no money for you. None. No. Yes?

No, I replied. Yes.

No, Gene Paley said. None.

Yes, I replied. No.

As he talked, Gene Paley folded the spreadsheets into a neat rectangular mound, stood up, and took off his shirt without shame or concern to reveal a white singlet, slack on his scrawny white body.

They say there are only three rules for writing a book, Gene Paley said in what felt an anecdote greasy with retelling. Only no one can remember what they are.
Copyright © 2018 by Richard Flanagan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

© Joel Saget
RICHARD FLANAGAN's seven novels have received numerous honours and are published in forty-two countries. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize for Gould's Book of Fish and the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. He lives in Tasmania. View titles by Richard Flanagan

Additional formats

  • First Person
    First Person
    A novel
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-525-52003-0
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    Richard Flanagan
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    A novel
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-525-58896-2
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    Think, Write, Speak
    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
    Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust
    978-1-101-87370-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 09, 2021
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    The Wapshot Chronicle
    John Cheever
    978-0-593-08177-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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    Feb 02, 2021
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    The Wapshot Scandal
    John Cheever
    978-0-593-31289-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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    Feb 02, 2021
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    Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-593-31085-4
    $25.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 27, 2020
  • The Scandal of the Century
    The Scandal of the Century
    And Other Writings
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-525-56680-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2020
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    Personal Writings
    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56721-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Aug 04, 2020
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    Berta Isla
    A novel
    Javier Marías
    978-0-525-56312-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2020
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    Life for Sale
    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-56514-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2020
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    The Source of Self-Regard
    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-525-56279-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 14, 2020
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    Love Is Blind
    A novel
    William Boyd
    978-0-525-56444-7
    $16.95 US
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    Sep 24, 2019
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    So Much Life Left Over
    A Novel
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-0-525-56441-6
    $16.95 US
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    Jul 09, 2019
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    Myra Breckinridge
    Gore Vidal
    978-0-525-56650-2
    $18.00 US
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    May 21, 2019
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    Warlight
    Michael Ondaatje
    978-0-525-56296-2
    $16.95 US
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    Apr 02, 2019
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    The Only Story
    A novel
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-525-56306-8
    $16.00 US
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    Mar 05, 2019
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    A Long Way from Home
    Peter Carey
    978-0-525-43599-0
    $16.95 US
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    Feb 05, 2019
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    The Rub of Time
    Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
    Martin Amis
    978-1-4000-9599-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 22, 2019
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    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-1-101-91118-1
    $14.95 US
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    Jan 08, 2019
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    The Frolic of the Beasts
    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-43415-3
    $15.00 US
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    Nov 27, 2018
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    The Myth of Sisyphus
    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56445-4
    $16.00 US
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    Nov 06, 2018
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    Dinner at the Center of the Earth
    Nathan Englander
    978-0-525-43404-7
    $16.95 US
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    Sep 04, 2018
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    Between Eternities
    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    978-1-101-97211-3
    $15.95 US
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    Aug 28, 2018
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    A Boy in Winter
    A Novel
    Rachel Seiffert
    978-0-8041-6880-9
    $16.00 US
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    Jul 10, 2018
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    The Red-Haired Woman
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-1-101-97423-0
    $16.00 US
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    Jul 10, 2018
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    Men Without Women
    Stories
    Haruki Murakami
    978-1-101-97452-0
    $17.00 US
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    May 01, 2018
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    The Golden Legend
    A novel
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-1-101-97338-7
    $17.00 US
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    Apr 24, 2018
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    The Woman on the Stairs
    A Novel
    Bernhard Schlink
    978-1-101-91234-8
    $16.95 US
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    Feb 20, 2018
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    A Horse Walks Into a Bar
    A novel
    David Grossman
    978-1-101-97349-3
    $15.95 US
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    Jan 16, 2018
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    South and West
    From a Notebook
    Joan Didion
    978-0-525-43419-1
    $16.00 US
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    Jan 02, 2018
  • Letters to Véra
    Letters to Véra
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-47658-6
    $24.00 US
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    Dec 12, 2017
  • House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
    House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
    Yasunari Kawabata
    978-0-525-43414-6
    $9.99 US
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    Dec 12, 2017
  • The Boat Rocker
    The Boat Rocker
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    978-0-8041-7037-6
    $16.00 US
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    Oct 17, 2017
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    Absolutely on Music
    Conversations
    Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa
    978-0-8041-7372-8
    $18.00 US
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    Vintage
    Oct 03, 2017
  • The Spy
    The Spy
    A Novel of Mata Hari
    Paulo Coelho
    978-0-525-43279-1
    $16.95 US
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    Jun 27, 2017
  • Keeping an Eye Open
    Keeping an Eye Open
    Essays on Art
    Julian Barnes
    978-1-101-87337-3
    $20.00 US
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    Jun 13, 2017
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    The Noise of Time
    A Novel
    Julian Barnes
    978-1-101-97118-5
    $17.00 US
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    Jun 13, 2017
  • I Am Not Your Negro
    I Am Not Your Negro
    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
    James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
    978-0-525-43469-6
    $16.00 US
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    Feb 07, 2017
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    A Decent Ride
    Irvine Welsh
    978-1-101-97084-3
    $16.95 US
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    Jan 10, 2017
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    Mothering Sunday
    A Romance
    Graham Swift
    978-1-101-97172-7
    $15.00 US
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    Jan 10, 2017
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    Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Three Stories That Inspired the Movie
    Alice Munro
    978-0-525-43426-9
    $7.99 US
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    Dec 13, 2016
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    Notwithstanding
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-1-101-96987-8
    $16.00 US
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    Oct 18, 2016
  • A Strangeness in My Mind
    A Strangeness in My Mind
    A novel
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-0-307-74484-5
    $17.95 US
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    Sep 20, 2016
  • The Blue Guitar
    The Blue Guitar
    John Banville
    978-0-8041-7361-2
    $17.00 US
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    The Dust That Falls from Dreams
    A Novel
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-1-101-97000-3
    $17.00 US
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    Jul 26, 2016
  • Wind/Pinball
    Wind/Pinball
    Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels)
    Haruki Murakami
    978-0-8041-7014-7
    $17.00 US
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    May 03, 2016
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    England and Other Stories
    Graham Swift
    978-1-101-87238-3
    $16.00 US
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    Apr 19, 2016
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    Odysseus Abroad
    A novel
    Amit Chaudhuri
    978-1-101-97145-1
    $16.00 US
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    Feb 09, 2016
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    God Help the Child
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-307-74092-2
    $16.00 US
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    The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
    Irvine Welsh
    978-0-8041-7321-6
    $16.00 US
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    Jan 12, 2016
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    The Buried Giant
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    978-0-307-45579-6
    $17.00 US
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    Amnesia
    Peter Carey
    978-0-8041-7132-8
    $15.95 US
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    Family Furnishings
    Selected Stories, 1995-2014
    Alice Munro
    978-1-101-87235-2
    $18.95 US
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    A Wilderness Station
    Selected Stories, 1968-1994
    Alice Munro
    978-1-101-97036-2
    $19.00 US
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    Sep 15, 2015
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    The Prophet
    Kahlil Gibran
    978-1-101-97078-2
    $9.95 US
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    A Map of Betrayal
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    978-0-8041-7036-9
    $15.95 US
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    Jul 07, 2015
  • The Zone of Interest
    The Zone of Interest
    Martin Amis
    978-0-8041-7289-9
    $15.95 US
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    The Walk Home
    A Novel
    Rachel Seiffert
    978-1-101-87343-4
    $16.95 US
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    Jun 23, 2015
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    Adultery
    Paulo Coelho
    978-1-101-87224-6
    $17.00 US
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    Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Haruki Murakami
    978-0-8041-7012-3
    $16.95 US
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    May 05, 2015
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    The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-8041-7147-2
    $16.95 US
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    Apr 14, 2015
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    The Fires of Autumn
    Irene Nemirovsky
    978-1-101-87227-7
    $15.00 US
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    Mar 17, 2015
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    The News: A User's Manual
    Alain De Botton
    978-0-307-47683-8
    $17.00 US
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    Dec 02, 2014
  • Falling Out of Time
    Falling Out of Time
    David Grossman
    978-0-345-80585-0
    $16.00 US
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    Dec 02, 2014
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    The Man of Feeling
    Javier Marías
    978-0-8041-7259-2
    $16.00 US
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    Oct 07, 2014
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    Levels of Life
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-345-80658-1
    $15.95 US
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    Jul 01, 2014
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    Beer in the Snooker Club
    Waguih Ghali
    978-0-8041-7074-1
    $16.00 US
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    Jun 10, 2014
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    Subtle Bodies
    Norman Rush
    978-1-4000-7713-7
    $15.00 US
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    Jun 03, 2014
  • Going Home Again
    Going Home Again
    Dennis Bock
    978-1-4000-9610-7
    $15.95 US
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    May 06, 2014
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    The Infatuations
    Javier Marías
    978-0-307-95073-4
    $17.00 US
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    Apr 22, 2014
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    Vintage Munro
    Nobel Prize Edition
    Alice Munro
    978-0-8041-7356-8
    $12.00 US
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    Apr 22, 2014
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    Bombay Stories
    Saadat Hasan Manto
    978-0-8041-7060-4
    $16.95 US
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    Mar 25, 2014
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    Paradise
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-8041-6988-2
    $17.00 US
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    Mar 11, 2014
  • The Blind Man's Garden
    The Blind Man's Garden
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-0-345-80285-9
    $16.95 US
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    Jan 28, 2014
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