"Bliss" was Peter Carey's astonishing first novel, originally published in 1981 - a fast-moving extravaganza, both funny and gripping, about a man who, recovering from death, is convinced that he is in Hell. For the first time in his life, Harry Joy sees the world as it really is and takes up a notebook to explore and notate the true nature of the Underworld. As in his stories and some of his later novels, it is Peter Carey's achievement in "Bliss" to create a brilliant but totally believable fusion of ordinary experience with the crazier fantasies of the mind. This powerful and original novel is a love story about a man who misunderstands the world so totally that he almost gets it right.
When the boy was almost eight, a woman stepped out of the elevator into the apartment on East Sixty-second Street and he recognized her straightaway. No one had told him to expect it. That was pretty typical of growing up with Grandma Selkirk… No one would dream of saying, Here is your mother returned to you.His Illegal Self is the story of Che-raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television ...
"Illywhacker is such an astonishing novel, of such major proportions, that before saying anything else one must record gratitude for its existence." – Geoffrey Dutton, Bulletin"The finest and funniest picaresque novel yet written in Australia" – Peter Pierce National Times"A great tottering tower of a novel which stands up astonishingly against all the odds." – Victoria Glendinning, London Sunday Times"It is impossible to convey in a review the cumulative brilliance and accelerating hilarity of the prose." – Nicholas Spice, London Review of Books"Awesome breadth, ambition and downright narrative joy…Illywhacker is a triumph." – Curt Suplee, ...
The Booker Prize-winning novel-now a major motion picture from Fox Searchlight Pictures.This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent-a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms-could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.
In this vivid and visceral work of historical fiction, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey imagines the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political philosopher and author of Democracy in America. Carey brings de Tocqueville to life through the fictionalized character of Olivier de Garmont, a coddled and conceited French aristocrat. Olivier can only begin to grasp how the other half lives when forced to travel to the New World with John "Parrot" Larrit, a jaded survivor of lifelong hardship who can’t stand his young master who he is expected to spy on for the overprotective ...
An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time. London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying ...
The first collection of short stories published by Peter Carey, whose other books include "Bliss", "Illywhacker" and "Oscar and Lucinda", which was awarded the 1988 Booker Prize. The stories, set in an ominous near-future that has a feel of contemporary life, are by turn bizarre and funny.
Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire—and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Peter Carey, author of , creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.
Ferocious and funny, penetrating and exuberant, Theft is two-time Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey's master class on the things people will do for art, for love . . . and for money.“I don't know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been famous as a painter could expect in his ...
