Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel moves between a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma during World War II and the decades that follow, tracing how trauma reverberates through a single life. Dorrigo Evans is an Australian surgeon forced to treat his fellow prisoners while Japanese guards beat and starve them during construction of the Thai-Burma Railway. He falls in love with his uncle's wife before the war, and that impossible romance haunts him through imprisonment, liberation, and a long career as a celebrated public figure. Flanagan, whose own father survived the Death Railway, writes with visceral power about suffering that cannot be conveyed in statistics. Individual deaths accumulate toward the seventeen thousand Allied prisoners and one hundred thousand Asian laborers who perished building three hundred miles of track. But the novel is equally interested in survival and its discontents. Dorrigo returns home to find that the world has moved on, that his experiences cannot be communicated, that the love he remembered may have been his own invention. He becomes a hero he does not recognize, married to a woman he does not love, unable to escape memories he cannot share. The title comes from the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho, whose narrow road to the deep north was a spiritual pilgrimage. Flanagan asks what such a journey means when the road leads through hell.