The paperback edition of the winner of the Man Booker Prize. Follows the story of Australian Dorrigo Evans, from his childhood in Tasmania, to his love affair with his uncle's young wife, to the despair of survival in a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway during WWII, to his subsequent life as an unfaithful husband. From the author of }The Unknown Terrorist{ and }Gould's Book Of Fish{, it's partly based on the wartime experiences of his father, who died on the day it was finished.