Peter Carey

The incomparable Oscar and Lucinda won Peter Carey his first Booker Prize, and the Miles Franklin Award. Oscar Hopkins, the hydrophobic, noisy-kneed son of a preacher, renounces his father's stern religion in favour of the Anglican Church. Lucinda Leplastrier, a frizzy-haired heiress, impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. When the two...

Now a feature film based on the Booker Prize-winning novel. As he flees the police, Ned Kelly scribbles his narrative in semi-literate but magically descriptive prose. To his pursuers, he is a thief and a murderer. To his own people, he's a hero for opposing the English. Ned, who saw his first prison cell at fifteen, has become the most...

Australia's master novelist takes us on the race of a lifetime. Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion...

In Amnesia Peter Carey, 'the greatest Australian writer' (Richard Flanagan), asks the most vital question of the past seventy years: Has America taken us over? When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into the computers of Australia's prison system, hundreds of asylum seekers walk free. Worse, an American corporation runs prison security, so the malware infects some 5000 American places...

Bliss, Peter Carey's first novel and Miles Franklin winner, remains a work ahead of its time. It takes dying during a heart attack for Harry Joy to realise that the life he thought was happy is actually hellish. His wife is a cheat, his kids are a source of shame, and his company spruiks carcinogens. While Harry is resuscitated, he...

Peter Carey's brilliant, hilarious, Booker Prize-shortlisted Illywhacker is the novel that brought him to international attention. Herbert Badgery is a vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch. He might very well be the embodiment of Australia's national character, especially in its fondness for tall stories and questionable history. As this charming scoundrel traverses the continent and a...

An Australian literary hoax lies at the core of My Life as a Fake, Peter Carey's captivating, 'continuously startling' (John Updike) contemplation of the art world. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London poetry journal, meets the mysterious Christopher Chubb. An Australian literary hoaxer, Chubb is carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit....

A dazzling comic masterpiece that reminds us why Peter Carey is Australia's most internationally acclaimed novelist. Olivier is a French aristocrat, the child of survivors of the revolution. Parrot, the son of an English printer, is a restless servant. When Olivier sets sail for the New World—ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to avoid another revolution—Parrot is sent...

One of Peter Carey's most searingly inventive novels yet. Wise, funny, profound. Michael 'Butcher' Boone is an ex-"really famous" painter, now reduced to living in a remote country house and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh. Alone together they've forged a delicate equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a...

The Fat Man in History and Other Stories combines Peter Carey's brilliant, bizarre, and chilling short stories from The Fat Man in History and War Crimes, with the addition of three stories not found in either collection. The stories from The Fat Man in History explore intriguing 'what-if' scenarios. The title story, for instance, imagines a world where a post-Marxist...

A wickedly funny satire on modern life and families. The Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamazovs. Granny Catchprice runs her family business, and her family, with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. Sixteen-year-old Benny dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire, and himself into an angel. But when a beautiful...

The first Penguin edition of Peter Carey's Collected Stories, with a cover by Michael Leunig, combines the brilliant, bizarre, funny, and chilling pieces originally published in The Fat Man in History and War Crimes (plus three stories not in either). Those from The Fat Man in History posit what-ifs, with the title story wondering how, were some post-Marxist utopia to...

Now packed with even more breathtaking colour photographs, wildlife descriptions, and detailed area maps, this updated sixth edition of the bestselling Antarctica Cruising Guide includes fascinating, full accounts of interesting places, spectacular landscapes, and local plants and wildlife. From penguins and other seabirds to whales, seals, and myriad mammals, this definitive field guide to Antarctica caters to visitors travelling by...

True History of the Kelly Gang is Peter Carey's stunning, Booker Prize-winning novel about Australia's most famous outlaw. As he flees the police, Ned Kelly scribbles his narrative in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose. To his pursuers, he is a thief and a murderer. To his own people, he's a hero for opposing the English. Ned, who saw his first...

The unrivalled telling of the legend as a beautiful clothbound hardback, part of the Penguin Modern Australian Classics series. As he flees the police, Ned Kelly scribbles his narrative in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose. To his pursuers he is a thief and a murderer. To his own people he's a hero for opposing the English. Ned, who saw his...

Peter Carey is at his inventive, brilliant best in His Illegal Self, a novel about a family who, once met, will never leave you. Che is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he yearns for his famous outlaw parents. Soon, Che too becomes an...

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Award, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs is dazzlingly entertaining. The year is 1837, and ex-convict Jack Maggs has returned illegally to London from Australia. Installing himself in the household of a genteel grocer, he attracts the attention of a cross-section of society. Saucy Mercy Larkin wants him for a mate, while...

Peter Carey hilariously conjures up dystopia in his picaresque The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. Severely afflicted, doomed never to be taller than three foot six, Tristan Smith faces death and danger from the first moment of his energetic and ambitious life. Here, for the first time, is the truth about him, from his birth in the Republic of Efica...

Now packed with even more breathtaking colour photographs, wildlife descriptions, and detailed area maps, this updated fifth edition of the bestselling Antarctica Cruising Guide includes fascinating, full accounts of interesting places, spectacular landscapes, and local plants and wildlife—from penguins and other seabirds to whales, seals, and myriad mammals. A definitive field guide to Antarctica, this book caters to South Pole...