Books by Peter Carey

A novelist returns to his native Australia after ten years in New York to rediscover, with the aid of his friends, the beauty of Sydney.

Stuck in Toronto during a blizzard, Sam Kellow and his family are staying in a $453 a night hotel. Unfortunately, they are down to their last $40. Sam is sure that the family is ruined, but his gambler father is just as sure that "The Big Bazoohly" (a jackpot) will come through and save them just in time. Unwilling to wait for luck to come to them, 9-year-old Sam sets out to find a Big Bazoohly on his own.

A landmark in contemporary Australian literature, The Fat Man in History brought early acclaim to Peter Carey for his brilliant and ingenious fiction. These twelve stories introduce visionary landscapes of intense clarity, where the rules of the game are bizarre yet chillingly familiar.

In this collection of short stories, originally published in 1974, Carey shows the glimmer of Swiftean influence he will amplify in later works.

Brought up in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, Che, a precocious seven-year-old boy, yearns for his parents, radical activists wanted by the FBI, until one afternoon, a woman claiming to be his mother arrives to help him escape, sending him on a bizarre odyssey that leads him to confront his life, his family, and his identity. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Carey can spin a yarn with the best of them.... Illywhacker is a big, garrulous, funny novel.... If you haven't been to Australia, read Illywhacker. It will give you the feel of it like nothing else I know." -- The New York Times Book Review 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 -- especially 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."A book of awesome breadth, ambition, and downright narrative joy.... Illywhacker is a triumph." -- Washington Post Book World

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"A rousing old-fashioned narrative. . . . [that] stands on its own as an adventure story." --The New York Times Book Review From the Booker Prize-winning author, a vivid and robust novel of Dickensian London--a place and a story teeming with mystery, science, and passion.The time, the 1830s. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported to Australia, has now reversed his fortunes--and seeks to fulfill his well-concealed, innermost desire. Returning "home" under threat of execution, he inveigles his way into a household in Great Queen Street, where he's quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements--and where he falls under the hypnotic scrutiny of Tobias Oates, a celebrated young writer fascinated by the process of mesmerism and obsessed with the criminal mind.From this volatile milieu emerges a handful of vividly drawn characters in the dangerous pursuit of love, whether romantic or familial--each of them with secrets, and secret longings, that could spell certain ruin. And as their various schemes converge, the captivating figure at the center is Jack Maggs himself, at once frightening, mystifying, and utterly compelling.

Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious manuscript Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose genius? As Sarah tries to secure the manuscript, Chubb draws her into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping, and exile–a story that couldn’t be true unless its teller were mad. My Life as a Fake is Carey at his most audacious and entertaining.

The romance between Oscar Hopkins, an awkward theologian who supports himself at Oxford by betting on horses, and Lucinda, a teenage heiress equally fond of gambling, scandalizes Victorian English society.

A combustibly funny, harrowing and utterly original novel from the internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda. Granny Catchprice runs her family business--and her family--with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. But a very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office turns the family upside down in this darkly comic masterpiece.

Peter Carey, Australian writer and winner of two Booker Prizes (OSCAR AND LUCINDA and TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG), returns with a bawdy and wickedly plotted tale of a formerly famous painter, his enormous man-child brother, and the femme fatale who lures them to Japan for an adventure involving forgery and the "art police."

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.

The Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and The Tax Inspector now gives readers a hero, the malformed but ferociously wilful 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.

The Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda describes how his shy young son's fascination with Japanese manga and anime led father and son on an intriguing odyssey to Tokyo, where they discover the intricacies of modern-day Japanese culture, from shitamachi and the Internet to kabuki and the samurai.