A wild, hallucinatory novel told in twelve chapters, each printed in a different colour of ink, narrated by William Buelow Gould — a real-life convict transported to the brutal Sarah Island penal station in 1825 and forced to paint specimens of the colony's fish. Flanagan won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the book in 2002. It is the strangest, funniest, and most savage novel ever written about Tasmania's convict history, and it captures the colony's violence, beauty, and lunacy in a way no straight history could.
The real Gould paintings survive in the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts in Hobart — they are tiny watercolour portraits of fish that Gould caught and gutted before painting from the dying specimens.