{"product_id":"2026200016291-secondhand-goulds-book-of-fish-a-novel-in-12-fish","title":"Gould's Book Of Fish: A Novel In 12 Fish","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Fair\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Wear and tear with damage\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the nightmarish depths of a 19th-century Tasmanian penal colony, a convict named William Buelow Gould picks up a brush and begins to paint fish — and in doing so, conjures a world as grotesque, luminous, and achingly human as any in modern literature. Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish chronicles the hallucinatory journey of its narrator, who discovers Gould's watercolour fish paintings alongside a handwritten manuscript, pulling him — and the reader — into a fever-dream of colonial brutality, desperate creativity, and the unstable nature of history itself. Each of the novel's twelve chapters is named for a fish that Gould painted, structuring the narrative as a cabinet of wonders: part historical record, part tall tale, part visionary myth.\n\nFlanagan writes with ferocious, poetic intensity, wielding language as both a weapon and a lifeline against the machinery of Empire and the erasure of the human spirit. Rooted in the real history of Sarah Island, Australia's most brutal convict settlement, the novel argues that art is the only true act of defiance against oblivion. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, it stands as a landmark of Australian fiction — a book that transforms the darkest chapter of colonial history into something hauntingly, unforgettably beautiful. Whether Gould's manuscript is truth or fabrication is a question the novel refuses to answer, and that unresolved tension is precisely where its power lives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49336815681755,"sku":"2026200016291-SECONDHAND","price":20.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/1edef1c2-70b4-49cd-a3d0-989299e99257.png?v=1789958669","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200016291-secondhand-goulds-book-of-fish-a-novel-in-12-fish","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}