Book excerpt: “Death of a River Guide makes good on a truly soaring ambition and flirts with literary greatness. . . . An indelible vision of how surely the history of a land plays its part in shaping the interior landscape of the human beings who occupy it.” —The Chicago Tribune With Death of a River Guide, Richard Flanagan gives us an extraordinary novel as sprawling and compelling as the land and people it describes. Beneath a waterfall on a remote Tasmanian river, Aljaz Cosini is drowning. Beset by visions, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. He sees his father, Harry, burying his own father, Boy. He sees Boy himself as a young man, and his Auntie Ellie, chased by a cow she believes is a Werowa spirit. In the waters that rush over him Aljaz finds a world where his story connects to family stories that are Aboriginal, Celtic, Italian, English, Chinese, and East European—what he ultimately discovers in the flood of the past is the soul history of his country.