Flanagan keeps the reader guessing with a dizzying mix of history, fantasy and word play in this wildly inventive novel steeped in the 19th-century history of Tasmania and its brutal colonial prison. Billy Gould, his bawdy convict-narrator, contributes the paintings that introduce each section. winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize, Gould's Book of Fish is a marvelously imagined epic of 19th-century Australia -- a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites -- whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish.  (AUS126, $14.00)