An unemployed Tasmanian finds an amazing book in a junk shop that takes him back to the nineteenth century, to the cruel and fantastic reality of the island convict settlement of Sarah Island off the coast of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania).

"Nobody in the whole world, except for me, I could not see and witness the miracle that had happened, when the whole huge world shrank to the size of a dark corner in a junk shop and eternity was reduced to that moment in which I first brushed dry mud from the cover of an outlandish book."

Richard Flanagan (b. 1962) is a descendant of Irish convicts exiled to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) during the Great Famine. He grew up in a large Catholic family in the mining town of Rosebery. At the age of sixteen he became a worker. Later winning a Rhodes Scholarship, he was educated at Oxford. His first two books, The Death of Hyde River (1994) and The Clap of One Hand (1997), brought him widespread recognition in Australia. Gould's Book of Fishes became a cult novel there and won the Commonwealth Literary Prize in 2002. The writer lives in Tasmania with his wife and three daughters.