Book of the Week is a bravura love letter to Tasmania

In our weekly look at books we focus on Waterstones’ Non-Fiction of the Month for May 2025… Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is a bravura love letter to Tasmania by way of H.G. Wells, nuclear physics and Hiroshima, all rendered in sublime, page-turning prose.Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, the book is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows.

From an affair, through 1930s physics, to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die.Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents, and the terrible past that delivered him to that place.Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science and memory, it shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves. Top Ten Chart with Waterstones of Norfolk Street, in Lynn:1. A Case of Mice and Murder – Sally Smith 2. We Solve Murders – Richard Osman3. Belsay – LJ Ross4. How to Solve Your Own Murder – Kristen Perrin 5. King’s Lynn: a Potted History – Paul Richards6. The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo7. Butter – Asako Yuzuki8. Richard Flanagan – Question 7 9. My Favourite Mistake – Marian Keyes10. Meditations for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman