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.
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.
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.
"Parrot and Olivier in America "has been shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author comes an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early nineteenth-century America. Olivier--an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville--is 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 States--ostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution--Parrot 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 together--in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands--a 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.
'Ich weiß nicht, ob meine Geschichte grandios genug ist, um als Tragödie herhalten zu können, obwohl jede Menge Mist darin vorkommt. ' Michael ›Butcher‹ Boone war früher ein erfolgreicher Avantgarde-Maler, aber nach einer scheußlichen Scheidung ist er finanziell ruiniert. Jetzt sitzt er in der australischen Provinz, muss sich um seinen behinderten Bruder Hugh kümmern und außerdem versuchen, zu alter künstlerischer Größe zurückzufinden. Als dann plötzlich in einer Gewitternacht die schöne Kunstexpertin Marlene in Manolo Blahniks durch den Matsch gestöckelt kommt, bringt sie eine Lawine von Ereignissen ins Rollen. Nicht nur dass sie beiden Brüdern den Kopf verdreht, sie verwickelt sie auch in eine irrsinnige Kunstfälschungsaktion, die die beiden von Sydney über Tokio nach Manhattan führt. Peter Carey liefert einen faszinierenden Einblick in die Welt der modernen Kunst – und eine extrem komische Satire über den Kunstbetrieb.
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.
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.
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...
