Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry

Is Tasmanian salmon one big lie?In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world’s best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine conditions. What could be more appealing than the idea of Atlantic salmon sustainably harvested in some of the world’s purest waters?But what are we eating when we eat Tasmanian salmon? Richard Flanagan’s expose of the salmon farming industry in Tasmania is chilling. In the way that Rachel Carson took on the pesticide industry in her ground-breaking book Silent Spring, Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing.From the burning forests of the Amazon to the petrochemicals you aren’t told about to the endangered species being pushed to extinction you don’t know about; from synthetically pink-dyed flesh to seal bombs . . . If you care about what you eat, if you care about the environment, this is a book you need to read.Toxic is set to become a landmark book of the twenty-first century.

Richard Flanagan has been described by the Washington Post as ‘one of our greatest living novelists’ and as ‘among the most versatile writers in the English language’ by the New York Review of Books. He won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish. His most recent book is Question 7.