Vintage International
9 total works
This novel tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, an Oxford seminarian with a passion for gambling and Lucinda Leplastrier, a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass. The year is 1865. When they meet on the boat to Australia their lives will be changed forever...Peter Carey is the author of "The Fat Man in History", "Bliss" which won the Miles Franklin Award and the NSW Premier Award, and "Illywhacker", which was shortlisted for the 1985 Booker prize.
"The two-time Booker Prize-winning author now gives us a wildly exuberant, wily new novel that circumnavigates 1954 Australia, revealing as much about the country-continent as it does about three audacious individuals who take part in the infamous 10,000 mile race, the Redex Trial. Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in south eastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed school teacher who calls the turns and creeks crossings on a map that will remove them, without warning, from the white Australia they all know so well. This is a thrilling high speed story that starts in one way, and then takes you some place else. It is often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves. Set in the 1950s, this a world every American will recognize: black, white, who we are, how we got here, and what we did to each other along the way. A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey's late style masterpiece"--
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. Although graphically violent and disturbing, the two mediums are both inherently concerned with Japan's rich history and heritage, and hold a huge popular appeal that crosses the generations.
Led by their adolescent guide Takashi, an uncanny mix of generosity and derision, father and son look for the hidden puzzles and meanings, searching, often with comic results, for a greater understanding of these art forms, and for what they come to refer to as their own 'real Japan'. From Manhattan to Tokyo, Commodore Perry to Godzilla, kabuki theatre to the post-war robot craze, Wrong about Japan is a fascinatingly personal, witty and moving exploration of two very different cultures.
Led by their adolescent guide Takashi, an uncanny mix of generosity and derision, father and son look for the hidden puzzles and meanings, searching, often with comic results, for a greater understanding of these art forms, and for what they come to refer to as their own 'real Japan'. From Manhattan to Tokyo, Commodore Perry to Godzilla, kabuki theatre to the post-war robot craze, Wrong about Japan is a fascinatingly personal, witty and moving exploration of two very different cultures.
If, in some post-Marxist utopia, obesity were declared counterrevolutionary, how would a houseful of fat men strike back? If it were possible to win a new body by lottery, what kind of people would choose ugliness? If two gun-toting thugs decided to take over a business—and run it through sheer terror—how far would their methods take them?
These are the questions that Peter Carey, author of The Tax Inspector and Oscar and Lucinda, brilliantly explores in this collection of stories. Exquisitely written and thoroughly envisioned, the tales in The Fat Man in History reach beyond their arresting premises to utter deep and often frightening truths about our brightest and darkest selves.
These are the questions that Peter Carey, author of The Tax Inspector and Oscar and Lucinda, brilliantly explores in this collection of stories. Exquisitely written and thoroughly envisioned, the tales in The Fat Man in History reach beyond their arresting premises to utter deep and often frightening truths about our brightest and darkest selves.
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 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—espcially 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.
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.
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 uninhabited storytelling from a writer of extravagant gifts.
Part The Wizard of Oz, part Dante’s Inferno, and part Australian Book of the Dead, Bliss is a triumph of uninhabited storytelling from a writer of extravagant gifts.
SOONTO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
The international bestseller, Booker Prize winner, and winner of the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book.
Out of 19th century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations: Ned Kelly, the son of poor Irish immigrants, viewed by the authorities as a thief (especially of horses) and, as a cold-blooded killer. To the people, though, he was a patriot hounded unfairly by rich English landlords and their stooges. In the end, Kelly and his so-called gang (his younger brother and two friends) led a massive police manhunt on a wild goose chase that lasted twenty months, in which Ned’s talents as a bushman were augmented by bank robberies and the support of nearly everyone not in a uniform. His one demand – for which he would have surrendered himself was his jailed mother’s freedom.
Executed by hanging more than a century ago, speaking as if from the grave, Kelly still resonates as the most potent legend in the land down under.
The international bestseller, Booker Prize winner, and winner of the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book.
Out of 19th century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations: Ned Kelly, the son of poor Irish immigrants, viewed by the authorities as a thief (especially of horses) and, as a cold-blooded killer. To the people, though, he was a patriot hounded unfairly by rich English landlords and their stooges. In the end, Kelly and his so-called gang (his younger brother and two friends) led a massive police manhunt on a wild goose chase that lasted twenty months, in which Ned’s talents as a bushman were augmented by bank robberies and the support of nearly everyone not in a uniform. His one demand – for which he would have surrendered himself was his jailed mother’s freedom.
Executed by hanging more than a century ago, speaking as if from the grave, Kelly still resonates as the most potent legend in the land down under.
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.
'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 as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard ...'So begins Peter Carey's highly charged and lewdly funny new novel. Told by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones and his 'damaged 220-pound brother' Hugh, it recounts their adventures and troubles after Butcher's plummeting prices and spiralling drink problem force them to retreat to northern New South Wales. Here the formerly famous artist is reduced to being a caretaker for his biggest collector, and the nurse for his erratic brother. Then the mysterious Marlene turns up one stormy night, clad in a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Claiming that the brothers' friend and neighbour owns an original Jacques Liebovitz, she soon sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making or ruin of them all. Once again displaying Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language, "Theft" is a love poem of a very different kind.
Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo - and exploring themes of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption - this is a great novel which will also make you laugh out loud.
Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo - and exploring themes of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption - this is a great novel which will also make you laugh out loud.