Peter Carey

SUMMARY: “This is a fabulously idiosyncratic small masterpiece ... it’s so good it takes your breath away.”—Times (UK)After living abroad for years, novelist Peter Carey returns home to Sydney and attempts to capture its character. Seeking the help of his old friends, Carey is soon drawn into their strange, anarchic worlds, each one orbiting the place he has come back to see. The result is a wild and wonderful journey of discovery and rediscovery as bracing as the southerly bluster that sometimes batters Sydney’s shores. Famous sights such as Bondi Beach, the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the Blue Mountains all take on a strange new intensity when exposed to the penetrating gaze of the author and his friends.30 Days in Sydney offers the reader an enchanting glimpse behind the facades and the Venetian blinds of the city.

For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life. Part The Wizard of Oz, part Dante's Inferno, and part Australian Book of the Dead, Bliss is a triumph of uninhibited storytelling from a writer of extravagan gifts.

A landmark in contemporary Australian literature, The Fat Man in History brought early acclaim to Peter Carey for his brilliant and ingenious fiction. These twelve stories introduce visionary landscapes of intense clarity, where the rules of the game are bizarre yet chillingly familiar.

### From Publishers Weekly Carey, who has made a career out of boring into the psyches of scoundrels, delivers a cunning fugitive adventure set largely in the wilds of Australia. Raised by his boho-turned-bourgeois grandmother on New York's Upper East Side, Che Selkirk, seven years old in 1972, hasn't seen his Weathermenesque parents since he was a toddler, but when a young woman who calls herself Dial walks into Che's apartment one afternoon, he believes his mother has finally come. Within two hours, Dial and Che are on the lam and heading for Philly as Che's kidnapping hits the news. Unexpected trouble strikes, and soon the boy and Dial, who doesn't know how or if to tell Che that she is only a messenger who was supposed to escort him to meet his mother, land in a hippie commune in the Australian outback. The novel sags as Dial, with the help of local illiterate feral hippie Trevor, tries to make the primitive living situation work; the drama consists largely of commune infighting and the travails of living without running water, but the narrative eventually regains its thrust and barrels toward a bang-up conclusion. While this novel lacks the boldness of *Theft* or the sweep of *Oscar and Lucinda* , it's still a fine addition to the author's oeuvre. *(Feb.)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From School Library Journal Adult/High School—It is 1972 and seven-year-old Che Selkirk, the son of radical parents he has never met, lives in isolated privilege with his well-to-do grandmother. Denied access to television and the news, he picks up scraps of information about his outlaw mother and father from a teenage neighbor who assures Che that his parents will come and "break you out of here." When a woman named Dial arrives at the boy's Park Avenue apartment to take him on a day excursion, he assumes that she is his mother. Unfortunately, things go terribly awry and Che becomes a fugitive himself. He and Dial end up in the Australian bush in an inhospitable commune. Carey uses a stream-of-consciousness style that poignantly communicates Che's confusion about his life on the lam and what he really wants. The explosive conclusion is worth the wait as the author vividly portrays the hardscrabble, primitive life of a group of hippies in his native Australia. Young adults will appreciate *His Illegal Self* for its main character-an orphan by circumstance-who struggles to understand his predicament and ultimately gains not only wisdom, but also the love he has sought.— *Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>First published in 1985, this picaresque tale from Australian novelist Carey presents the life story of a highly unreliable 139-year-old con man. <br />Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>Carey can spin a yarn with the best of them.... Illywhacker is a big, garrulous, funny novel.... If you haven't been to Australia, read Illywhacker. It will give you the feel of it like nothing else I know." -- The New York Times Book ReviewIn Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character -- especially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies.As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere."A book of awesome breadth, ambition, and downright narrative joy.... Illywhacker is a triumph." -- Washington Post Book World -- <em>Review</em></p>

<h3>Review</h3><p>"<strong>My Life as a Fake</strong>_ _is so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling." –John Updike, <em>The New Yorker</em> </p><p>“Ingenious . . . Carey is as diabolical as the hoaxes that his book includes.” <em>— The New York Times</em> </p><p>"Brisk, relentlessly prankish. . . . A virtuoso amalgam of styles, simultaneously a literary conundrum of the Borges variety, an exotic adventure tale evocative of both the settings and the narrative methods of Conrad, and a horror story derived from Mary Shelley's <strong>Frankenstein</strong>." –_The New York Times Book Review </p><p><em>"A wholly absorbing, bizarrely madcap comedy and a telling commentary on the sometimes baffling sources of art. . . . Though fiction, the book is anything but fake. It's truth, beauty and comedy wrapped in one sprightly package." –</em>Chicago Tribune<br />_<br />“We have a great novelist living on the planet with us, and his name is Peter Carey." <br />_–Los Angeles Times Book Review </p><p><em>"Circling from the real to the imaginary and back is as happily perplexing as a drawing by M.C. Escher. . . . Carey can bring a character to life, give him a voice and a history and a psychological topography, in a single paragraph." –</em>The New York Review of Books </p><p><em>"No other Australian writer in our time has succeeded as well as Peter Carey in writing novels that compel the attention of a world-wide audience. His work . . . occupies a high plane of literary brilliance." –</em>The Boston Globe </p><p><em>“Peter Carey’s new novel comes like a monsoon after drought. It is a magnificent, poetic contemplation of the lying, fakery and insincerity inherent in the act of artistic creation. . . . It’s a charismatically furious piece of work, brilliantly meshing its ethical and artistic debate with a rich human drama.” –</em>The Times _(UK)<br /><em></em><br /><em></em>“Reads like the impossible offspring of a fictional ménage-à-trois involving <strong>Pale Fire</strong><em>, </em><strong>Lord Jim</strong><em>, </em>and <strong>Our Man in Havana</strong>. . . . A fabulous book in the original sense of the term--and in the other one, too." –_The Atlantic Monthly<br />_ <br />“In book after book, Peter Carey has proven that he's incapable of writing a dull page. . . . He’s one of the greatest storytellers alive. . . . A dazzling narrative.” <em>–The Christian Science Monitor</em> </p><p>“Fast, furious and fantastical. . . . Carey is Australia's finest living novelist.” <em>–The Guardian</em> </p><p>"Carey is that rare artist brave enough to flee success, a tactic that underlies his dazzling track record. Each of his novels sets him a different challenge; in each, he excels. A triumph in its own right, <strong>My Life as a Fake</strong>_ <em>leaves us wondering how he's going to delight and disconcert us in his next book." –</em>St. Louis Post-Dispatch </p><p>_"<strong>My Life as a Fake</strong>_ <em>is the real thing." –</em>Time </p><p><em>"Complex and masterful. . . . A haunting story whose surreal events are as captivating and memorable as the misguided aspirations of its characters." –</em>Minneapolis Star-Tribune_ <br />_<br />_"In<strong>_ _My Life as a Fake</strong>_, <em>Peter Carey has created a novel that is captivating and haunting, and, in the end, sinfully delightful. For both longtime readers and those coming to his work for the first time, it's a book not to miss." –</em>Richmond Times-Dispatch </p><p><em>"Great rollicking fun. . . . A dazzling, beautifully detailed, intellectually energetic book." –</em>The News &amp; Observer _(Raleigh)<br />_<br />_"<strong>My Life as a Fake</strong>_ _dazzles the reader with heady ideas and literary reference points (à la <strong>Frankenstein</strong>_ _and <strong>Pale Fire</strong>), then catapults us into madcap action. . . . [Carey] exudes a hallucinatory realism that makes imaginary universes feel concrete and believable." –_The Village Voice<br />_<br />"A devilishly engrossing meditation on illusion. . . . <strong>My Life as a Fake</strong>_ <em>[is] an ingenious homage to the power of the imagination and to Carey's ability to create–and connect–worlds within worlds." –</em>The Atlanta Journal-Constitution_</p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Carey’s <strong>My Life as a Fake</strong> is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious manuscript Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose genius? As Sarah tries to secure the manuscript, Chubb draws her into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping, and exile–a story that couldn’t be true unless its teller were mad. <strong>My Life as a Fake</strong> is Carey at his most audacious and entertaining. </p>

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.

SUMMARY: From the two-time Booker Prizewinning author comes an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early nineteenth-century America. Olivieran improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocquevilleis the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis. When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United Statesostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolutionParrot will be there, too: as spy for the marquis, and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, between their picaresque adventures apart and togetherin love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new landsa most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story, Peter Carey explores the experiment of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness and with all the richness and surprise of characterization, imagery, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer. SUMMARY: From the two-time Booker Prizewinning author comes an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early nineteenth-century America. Olivieran improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocquevilleis the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis. When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United Statesostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolutionParrot will be there, too: as spy for the marquis, and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, between their picaresque adventures apart and togetherin love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new landsa most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story, Peter Carey explores the experiment of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness and with all the richness and surprise of characterization, imagery, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.

From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business--and her family--with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire--and himself into an angel--the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.--

The Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and The Tax Inspector now gives readers a hero, the malformed but ferociously wilful Tristan Smith, who becomes the object of the world's byzantine political intrigues, even as he attains stardom in a bizarre Sirkus that is part passion play and part Mortal Kombat.

Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones, and his 'damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother' Hugh, Theft: A Love Story once again displays Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, friendship and redemption.