The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Winner of the 2014 Booker Prize, this novel follows Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon held as a prisoner of war on the Burma Death Railway during the Second World War.

The narrative moves between the camp, a love affair that precedes it, and the decades of fame and hollowness that follow, and it gives space to the Japanese and Korean guards as well as the prisoners. The title is borrowed from Matsuo Bashō’s travel diary, and classical Japanese poetry runs through the book alongside the account of the camp.