Book summary

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.

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."