First Person - Richard Flanagan

Title: First Person
Author: Richard Flanagan
Publisher: Knopf / Penguin Random House Australia
Format: Hardcover with dust jacket
First Edition, 2017
ISBN: 9780143787242

Condition: Very good second-hand condition. Dust jacket has light shelf wear and minor edge rubbing, with a small bump to the lower edge of the spine. Binding is firm and pages are clean and well-presented throughout.

First Person is a darkly comic and psychologically layered literary novel exploring fraud, authorship, obsession, and the uneasy relationship between truth and storytelling.

Set in 1990s Melbourne, the novel follows struggling writer Kif Kehlmann, who is hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of notorious conman Siegfried Heidl, a criminal awaiting trial and desperate to control his own narrative. As the project spirals into manipulation and paranoia, Kif becomes trapped in a bizarre and increasingly destructive relationship with a man who may be both delusional and dangerously charismatic.

Part literary satire and part psychological thriller, the novel draws heavily from Flanagan’s own experiences in publishing and explores the blurred boundaries between fiction, memory, performance, and identity. Beneath the humour and absurdity is a sharp examination of ambition, exploitation, and the stories people invent to survive.