Gould's Book of Fish

"The novel from author Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish is a tragicomic tapestry of nineteenth-century Australia, a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish." Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before all the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Sarah Island penal colony of Van Diemen's Land - now Tasmania. A talented phony and art forger, Gould was enlisted by the prison doctor Lempriere to get him into the Royal Society by painting a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled. Foolish Billy Gould, invader of Australia, thief, liar, and murderer, lived to bear witness to horror and ridicule, and to miracles.