Peter Carey Books

National hero, Javanese mystic, pious Muslim, and leader of the "holy war" against the Dutch between 1825 and 1830, the Yogyakarta prince, Dipanagara, is pre-eminent in the pantheon of modern Indonesian historical figures. This is the first full biography based on Dutch and Javanese sources. The Power of Prophecy sets Dipanagara's life against the context of the turbulent events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when European imperialsm reached Indonesi, destroying forever Java's old order and propelling the twin forces of Islam and Javanese national identity into a fatal confrontation with the Dutch. This confrontation known as the Java War, in which Dipanagara was defeated and exiled, marked the beginning of the modern colonial period in Indonesia. The book presents a detailed analysis of Dipanagara's pre-war visions and aspirations as a Javanese Ratu Adil ("Just King") based on his autobiography, the Babad Dipanagara, and other Javanese sources, as well as Dutch and British records. The book is concerned with the rise of Western colonial rule in Indonesia, the fate of indigenous cultures in an age of imperialism, and the role of Javanese Islam in modern Indonesian history.

The stories in Peter Carey's collection are bizarre, funny and chilling. Their landscape is exotic and surreal, an ominous near-future that has the distinct feel of contemporary life. Carey's narratives are an exhilarating blend of fable, fantasy and allegory in which, as in dreams, something odd and menacing takes control. Here are societies in which people gamble for new bodies in a genetic lottery or watch apprehensively as first buildings, then parts of the landscape, and eventually their neighbours, begin to dematerialise and vanish. Here is what happens when a miniature replica of a small town and its inhabitants assumes a more compelling reality than its original or when a group of fat men, ostracised by a revolutionary government, plot its overthrow.

Peter Carey is justly renowned for his novels, which have included the Booker Prize-winning titles Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. He is also a dazzling writer of short stories. This volume collects together all the stories from The Fat Man in History and War Crimes as well as three other stories.

'I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silence...'To the authorities in pursuit of him, outlaw Ned Kelly is a horse thief, bank robber and police-killer. But to his fellow ordinary Australians, Kelly is their own Robin Hood. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Peter Carey brings the famous bushranger wildly and passionately to life.

A Long Way from Home follows Irene Bobs, a fast-driving enthusiast, and her car salesman husband as they tackle the grueling Redex Trial in 1950s Australia. This thrilling tale explores the nation's connection to its ancient culture amid the challenges of love and pain during a brutal car race.

Forget the limpid, dreamlike views we saw on the television during the Olympics, the paradise of hedonism represented by Bondi Beach and the rest; Sydney is a savage city, as violent in its setting and its weather as it is in its history. This is a brief and heartfelt account of an expatriate writer revisiting his past, examining as he does so the paradox of a blessed country with a bloody, accursed past. Above all, this book is about Australian mateship, and it is the biographies, jokes and stories of Peter's friends and contemporaries that provide the backbone.

In 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 bethe king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character--espcially of its proclivity for tall stories andbarefaced 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 mostenchanting writers at work in any hemisphere. "From the Trade Paperback edition."

'My name is Tristan Smith. I was born in Chemin Rouge in Efica - which is to say as much to you, I bet, if I declared I was from the moon.' The Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and The Tax Inspector now gives readers a hero, the malformed but ferociously willful 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.

This novel, by the author of Oscar and Lucinda , tells the story of 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 note down the true nature of the Underworld.

The day that Benny Catchprice was fired from the spare parts department of Catchprice Motors by his aunt Cathy was also the day that the Tax Inspector, Maria Takis, arrived to begin her long-overdue audit of the family business. But this is no ordinary investigation. Maria is eight months' pregnant, Granny Catchprice is at war with her offspring, and Benny, her grandson, wants to become an angel...

Imagine what a dictionary might look like about thirty years hence, when all of the world's problems are solved and our current dictionaries are a distant memory. Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss have lined up an incredible array of writers to bring you that futuristic dictionary and a vision of the world as it might be. Think of it as a dictionary of language for describing what the future could look like a dictionary that is both useful and romantic, hopeful and necessary, pragmatic and idealistic, and frequently funny. This is science fiction but with a difference.

This collection is a companion to the long-established and highly successful Modern Short Stories One and its essential aims are the same: to offer stories of high literary quality which, though written for adults, can be enjoyed and appreciated by adolescents. The fifteen stories included are by distinguished writers from Africa, America, Australia, India, Ireland, Italy and Great Britain; and within their artistic context several of them deal with the special personal and social concerns of society today.The collection includes stories by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Maeve Binchy, Garrison Keillor, Peter Carey, Flannery O'Connor and Nadine Gordimer.

Jack Maggs, raised and deported as a criminal, has returned from Australia, in secret and at great risk. What does he want after all these years, and why is he so interested in the comings and goings at a plush townhouse in Great Queen Street? And why is Jack himself an object of such interest to Tobias Oates, celebrated author, amateur hypnotist and fellow-burglar - in this case of people's minds, of their histories and inner phantoms? In this hugely engaging novel one of the finest of contemporary writers pays homage to his Victorian forebears. As Peter Carey's characters become embroiled in each other's furtive desires, and increasingly fall under one another's spell, their thirst for love exacts a terrible, unexpected cost.

Oscar Hopkins is an Oxford seminarian with a passion for gambling. Lucinda Leplastrier is a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass. The year is 1864. When they meet on the boat to Australia their lives will be forever changed . . . Daring, rich, intense and bizarre, Peter Carey's Booker prize-winning novel is a brilliant achievement - a moving love story and a historical tour de force that is also powerfully contemporary.

Seven-year-old Che was abandoned by his radical Harvard-student parents during the upheaval of the 1960s, and since then has been raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. He yearns to see or hear news of his famous outlaw parents, but his grandmother refuses to tell him anything.

Theft: A Love Story - from the author of Amnesia , Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang , Peter Carey's Booker longlisted novel of art, friendship and fraud.

Olivier is an aristocrat, the traumatized child of survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot the son of an itinerant printer who always wanted to be an artist but has ended up a servant. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be brought together by their travels in America. When Olivier sets sail for America, ostensibly to study its prisons but in reality to save his neck from one more revolution - Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, and their picaresque travels together and apart - in love and politics, prisons and the world of art - Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, with dazzling wit and inventiveness.

Olivier is an aristocrat, the traumatized child of survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot the son of an itinerant printer who always wanted to be an artist but has ended up a servant. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be brought together by their travels in America.When Olivier sets sail for America, ostensibly to study its prisons but in reality to save his neck from one more revolution - Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, and their picaresque travels together and apart - in love and politics, prisons and the world of art - Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, with dazzling wit and inventiveness.

Melbourne, the late 1940s. A young conservative Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubb's imagination. Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but the local authorities also sue its editor for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone uncannily resembling the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle, leaps to his feet. At this moment a horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he has himself manufactured...

In a stunning memoir-cum-travelogue Peter Carey charts this journey, inspired by Charley's passion for Japanese Manga and anime, and explores his own resulting re-evaluation of Japan.

When Gaby Bailleux released the Angel Worm into Australia's prison system, allowing hundreds of asylum seekers to walk free, she also let the cat out of the bag. The Americans ran the prisons, like so many parts of her country, and so the doors of some 5000 American places of incarceration also opened. Both countries' secrets threatened to pour out.Was this a mistake, or had Gaby declared cyberwar on the US? Felix Moore - known to himself as 'Australia's last serving left wing journalist' - has no doubt. Her act was part of the covert conflict between Australia and America. That conflict dates back to the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane in 1943, stretches forward to America's security interests in Pine Gap and commercial interests everywhere, and has as its most outrageous act the coup of 1975. Funded by his property-developer mate Woody Townes, Felix is going to write Gaby's biography, to save her, and himself, and maybe his country.But how to get Gaby to co-operate? What role does her film-star mother have to play? And what, after all, does Woody really want?

London 2011. Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the unexpected death of her lover of thirteen years - but as the mistress of a married man, she has to grieve in private. Her employer at the museum, aware of Catherine's grief, gives her a special project - to piece together both the mechanics and the story of an extraordinary automaton, commissioned in the nineteenth century by Henry Brandling to amuse his dying son. Linked by the mysterious automaton, Catherine and Henry's stories intertwine across time to explore the mysteries of life and death, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention and the body's astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

Die finanzielle Situation von Sams Familie ist mehr als instabil, da die Familie vom Glücksspiel lebt. Doch eines Tages sind sie pleite und Sam versucht seine Familie vor dem völligen Ruin zu bewahren.

Michael »Butcher« Bone, einst erfolgreicher Avantgarde-Künstler, bleibt nach einer scheußlichen Scheidung nichts mehr. Zusammen mit seinem behinderten 220-Pfund schweren Bruder Hugh, sitzt er in der australischen Provinz. Der Alkohol wird mehr und die Perspektive weniger. Als plötzlich in einer Gewitternacht die schöne Kunstexpertin Marlene in Manolo Blahniks durch den Matsch gestöckelt kommt und den Brüdern den Kopf verdreht, bringt sie eine Lawine von Ereignissen ins Rollen, die sie alle für immer retten oder ruinieren wird. Ein wilder Ritt durch die internationale Kunstszene beginnt, von Manhattan nach Tokyo, voll von wahnsinnigen Sammlern und stilechten Betrügern, brilliant durchdacht und unglaublich komisch. Und gleichzeitig eine verrückte und romantische Liebesgeschichte mit überraschener Pointe, die dem Leser den Kopf verdreht und ihn atemlos zurücklässt.

Peter Carey, als "phantasiereichster Autor unseres Jahrhunderts" bezeichnet, entwirft in "Illywhacker" zwei fiktive Staaten mit eigener Kultur. Erzählt wird die turbulente Geschichte von Tristan Smith, einem behinderten Sohn einer Theaterleiterin. Das Buch vereint Romanze, Abenteuer, Agentengeschichte und Sozialsatire.