A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land, The Sound of One Hand Clapping was both critically acclaimed and a bestseller in Australia. It now introduces to an international readership a young Australian who is emerging as one of our most talented new storytellers. In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her migrant Slovenian father was drunk, her mother Maria walked off into a blizzard, never to return. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the barbarism of an old world left behind, about the harshness of a new country, and the destiny of those in a land beyond hope who seek to redeem themselves through love.
"Compelling . . . affecting . . . Flanagan has thoughtful things to say about history and the ordinary people whose lives are so powerfully affected by it."
The Washington Post Book World
"Masterful . . . Combining acuity with lyricism, Flanagan chronicles the insidious effects of war . . . [and] how the fragmented can be made whole again."
San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
"Flanagan is an accomplished ringmaster of despair and tenderness. Short chapters of almost unbearable tension hack out the pasts of Maria, Bojan, and Sonja against a backdrop of wind and rain. . . . Powerful and disturbing."
