The narrow road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

'The fire was rising at his back, its flames the only living thing, and he thought of her head and her face and body, the red camellia in her hair; but as hard as he tried now, he could not remember her face.' 

In the despair of a  Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Raçway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that wçl change his life forever.

Richard Flanagan's savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.