Richard Flanagan’s powerful and moving elegy for lost love and depiction of the cruelty and tenuousness of life on the Thai–Burma railway is being widely hailed as a masterpiece of our time. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a war ballad with both tenderness and brutality, partly inspired by his father’s true, harrowing experiences in the notorious Japanese POW camp. Steven Gale speaks to Richard Flanagan about this extraordinary achievement from one of our most accomplished authors.