Gould's Book of Fish

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish is a novel by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, published in 2001. It was his third novel.

The book is a fictionalised account of the life of the convict William Buelow Gould, both at Macquarie Harbour and elsewhere during his time in Van Diemen's Land, the colony that later became Tasmania. The novel moves between the penal settlement on the west coast and the rest of Gould's life in the colony. Its twelve chapters are each named for a fish, and the novel makes use of paintings by the real convict artist William Buelow Gould, reproduced with permission from his Sketchbook of Fishes, which is held by the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts in the State Library of Tasmania. Those images of fish are used both as chapter headings and as the inspiration for what follows them, and the world they belong to is one of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose history is presented through a very unusual taxonomy of fish.

Flanagan writes about Tasmania and its past in both fiction and non-fiction, and this novel takes the colony's own artistic record as the basis for its story.