Description
Book SynopsisOSCAR AND LUCINDA is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century England and Australia where the two potential lovers lead parallel lives until chance brings them together on board ship.
A narrative tangle of love, religion, gambling, commerce and colonialism culminates in a nightmare expedition – the result of a wager – to transport a glass church across the Australian wilderness.
In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself in a voice that is direct, colloquial, theatrical, and utterly magical. To his pursuers he is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying British imperial authority in support of the poor Irish settlers who are its victims. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Carey brings the famous bushranger unforgettably to life.
Trade ReviewA novel of extraordinary richness, complexity and strength … it brings the past, in all its difference, bewilderingly into our present. It fills me with a wild, savage envy and no novelist could say fairer than that. -- Angela Carter
There is no greater triumph than fiction which engages with life’s tragedy and comedy both, and which acknowledges their inseparability.
Oscar and Lucinda accomplishes this. Full of ideas – about religion, about nationhood, about individuality – it is never burdened by them: it is always fixed in the material world, in its endlessly surprising detail. -- Claire Messud * Daily Telegraph *
