Reviews & Articles
"Stunning... Mr Flanagan has turned the story into an armature for a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world....[Flanagan] has written a book that deserves to win him the sort of readership enjoyed by two much better-known novelists with whom he has much in common: Don DeLillo and Martin Amis. [The Unknown Terrorist] does just as dazzling a job of limning its subject, conjuring up the postmodern, post-sci-fi world of globalized terror and trade, where drugs and weapons and human beings are smuggled with equal brazenness across borders, and money and power flow back and forth between the legitimate and criminal worlds, unnoticed by the crowds clamoring for more bytes and pixels and bandwidth. Flanagan makes the reader see the teeming, seamy streets where the Doll lives and works, and the swank neighborhoods where many of her customers have homes. He captures the nervous jujitsu that passes for debate and conversation in the streets, and the frenetic, strobe-lit pulse of the urban wasteland that is modern Sydney"
The New York Times
"The standard model of good and evil is simple if not simplistic: Everybody on our side is good, and everybody on their side is bad. For anyone in the post-9/11 world who still believes this, Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist should be required reading -- with eyelids pinned open, if necessary, and forced to look." Read full transcript (PDF 88KB)
Daniel Masiel,
THE WASHINGTON POST
"Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan has to be Australia's most unlikely Rhodes Scholar and looking at his life before and after Oxford, it is no surprise that he hated the experience. The Unknown Terrorist could be the most contentious for his harsh critique of what he believes modern Australia has become. I spoke with Flanagan in Sydney." Read full transcript (PDF 30KB)
Kerry O'Brien,
The 7.30 Report