WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Financial Times, Seattle Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune "Some years, very good books win the Man Booker Prize, but this year a masterpiece has won it. . .. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism. This is the book that Richard Flanagan was born to write and which now takes its place in the canon of world literature -From the Presentation Speech, Man Booker Prize 2014 Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, 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 will change his life forever. This 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