Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
by Richard Flanagan
Grove Press, 2002

(from the publisher) Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer & forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish ....

The most remarkable novel yet from the internationally acclaimed author of Death of a River Guide and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish is a marvelous historical epic of nineteenth-century Australia, a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish. It is the kind of book that comes along once in a very great while—a book of breathtaking writing and intellectual inquiry that stands out as one of the best novels of recent years.

William Buelow Gould was a forger and thief sentenced to life imprisonment in a penal colony in Van Diemen's Land—now Tasmania. After six months he escaped and boarded a whaler for the Americas, but before long his adventures landed him back in prison. The prison doctor Lempriere utilized Gould's painting talents to create an illustrated taxonomy of the country's exotic sea creatures, which Lempriere madly believed would ensure his place in history and the Royal Society. Gould's book was then lost and re-created, destroyed and hidden, and finally resurfaced in the present day, littered with Gould's scrawls recording his unutterably strange life—part freewheeling picaresque, part Gothic horror—and that of his country, a penal colony, settlement, and magical space populated by generals, visionaries, and madmen.

This is an exquisitely produced book: Each chapter is printed in a different colored ink to re-create its narrator's writing conditions, and each chapter opening will include a reproduction of the original full-color artwork by William Gould. Reminiscent of the richness and historical audacity of Jeanette Winterson's The Passion, Jim Crace's Quarantine, and Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Gould's Book of Fish is a tour de force that interrogates the reliability of history and science and the substance of artistic creation.

About the Author

	© Matt Newton

Richard Flanagan won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for First Fiction and the South Australian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction for Death of a River Guide, and the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year Award and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction for The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which he also adapted and directed as a film. he lives in Tasmania with his wife and three children.