True History of the Kelly Gang

by Peter Carey

Peter Carey tells the story of Australia's most famous outlaw, Ned Kelly, who was executed as a murderer and a horse thief in 1880. The facts of Kelly's brief life are revealed in a series of letters, very much in his own quirky vernacular voice, that he writes to the baby daughter he never sees. What is clear from Peter Carey's account is that poverty, hardship, and the prejudice of the English police force toward the Irish are all part of the plight of Ned Kelly--a good boy gone wrong who became a national hero. THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG was a New York Times "Editor's Choice" for 2001.

Editions of True History of the Kelly Gang

ISBN 9780375410840	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Random House Inc	Date 2001	Price $1.00	Used - Acceptable
ISBN 9780702231889	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher University of Queensland Press	Date 2000	Price $6.38
ISBN 9780702231674	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher University of Queensland Press	Date 2000	Price AUD $200.00	Fine
ISBN 9780613458443	Binding/Format Prebinding	Publisher Bt Bound	Date 2002	Price None Available
ISBN 9781402511776	Binding/Format Audio Cassette	Publisher Recorded Books	Date 2001	Price $3.39	Good
ISBN 9780375724671	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Vintage Books	Date 2001	Price $1.00	Used - Good

Publisher Notes

Winner of the 2001 Booker Prize

Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also—at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century—a Great American Novel.

This is Ned Kelly's true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and, ultimately, a cold-blooded murderer; to most other Australians, he was a scapegoat and patriot persecuted by "English" landlords and their agents.

With his brothers and two friends, Kelly eluded a massive police manhunt for twenty months, living by his wits and strong heart, supplementing his bushwhacking skills with ingenious bank robberies while enjoying the support of most everyone not in uniform. He declined to flee overseas when he could, bound to win his jailed mother's freedom by any means possible, including his own surrender. In the end, however, she served out her sentence in the same Melbourne prison where, in 1880, her son was hanged.

Still his country's most powerful legend, Ned Kelly is here chiefly a man in full: devoted son, loving husband, fretful father, and loyal friend, now speaking as if from the grave. With this mythic outlaw and the story of his mighty travails and exploits, and with all the force of a classic Western, Peter Carey has breathed life into a historical figure who transcends all borders and embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom.

Media Reviews

"In a spectacular feat of literary ventriloquism, the Australian-born novelist Peter Carey invites the outlaw Ned Kelly to tell his story. He summons the rollicking, unschooled, hugely colorful voice of Australia's best-known underdog for a bravura book-length performance. Writing...convincingly in Ned's argot..., [Carey] invests Ned's account with all the makings of a swaggering adventure tale as well as a classic Western tragedy....[A] seamlessly imagined coming-of-age story set in wild country and wilder times. Though Ned Kelly died in 1880..., he could not be more furiously alive."

First Line

I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.

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