Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang - (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) by Peter Carey (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

Peter Carey's two Booker Prize-winning novels, in one handsome hardcover volume.

Oscar and Lucinda is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century Australia. Oscar, a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine, joins forces with Lucinda, a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. The resulting narrative tangle of love, commerce, religion, and colonialism culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback. In True History of the Kelly Gang, the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero defying the authority of the English. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Peter Carey brings the famous bushranger wildly and passionately to life.

Review Quotes

Praise for OSCAR AND LUCINDA:

"It is Thomas Wolfe one is reminded of most when reading Peter Carey . . . They share that magnificent vitality, that ebullient delight in character, detail, and language that turn a novel into an important book." --THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"The stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of nineteenth-century history." --TIME

"A kind of rollercoaster ride . . .The reader emerges . . . gasping, blinking, reshaped in a hundred ways, conscious that the world is never going to look the same again." --THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

Praise for TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG:

"A spectacular feat of imagination." --THE BOSTON GLOBE

"Vastly entertaining . . . As if Huck Finn and Shakespeare had joined forces to prettify the legend of Jesse James." --THE NEW YORK TIMES

"A bravura performance . . . Rewards the persistent reader with a powerful emotional experience." --THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"The ingenuity, empathy, and poetic ear that the novelist brings to his feat of imposture cannot be rated too high." --John Updike, THE NEW YORKER

About the Author

PETER CAREY is a two-time winner of the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for more than twenty-five years.

PAUL GILES is the Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney and author of numerous books, including The Global Remapping of American Literature and Transnationalism in Practice.