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.
Customer Reviews
Review this book!
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." -- Janet Maslin
-- New York Times
"Carey succeeds brilliantly in allowing Kelly to tell most of the story himself, in his own words as a first-person narrator....Carey has found the ways and means to tell the story, faithful to the facts, yet adding dimension and complexity to it. Some elements have been simplified, but not much has been changed....But the great strength and pleasure of this novel is the language Carey has created for Ned Kelly, allowing a full range from lyrical to rowdy and ribald." -- George Garrett
-- Washington Post Book World
"Facing more than 300 pages of 'Kellyspeak,' a Careyan derivative of the language Ned used..., may daunt readers until they develop a fascination for so original a verbal continuo....couched in Ned's voice, events unfold with slow-motion inevitability...." -- Peter Porter
-- Times Literary Supplement
"Carey's novel is...a corrective to the popular conception-even among some Australians-of Kelly as a thug, thief and murderer. The Ned Kelly of this account is nothing less than a folk hero and freedom fighter, a defiant exemplar of Irish-Australian cussedness in the face of colonial oppression....Packed with incident, alive with comedy and pathos, TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG contains pretty much everything you could ask of a novel." -- Anthony Quinn
-- New York Times Book Review
"Peter Carey is a great-hearted writer, with an eye and an appetite for the vagaries and eccentricities of human beings as they struggle to make their way through the world's difficulties....The tone never falters, and this is a considerable achievement given the breadth of the book, yet there are passages when the relentless, unpunctuated periods of the prose grind with awful monotony in the reader's ear....[Carey's] Ned Kelly is no saint..., but he is a tragic figure, driven by love and outrage and the desire for justice. Even if Australian critics are ashamed of Ned Kelly, they can take nothing but pride in Peter Carey." -- John Banville
-- New York Review of Books
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published date: 2000
Pages: 401
Other Editions
Similar books
Nowhere Else on Earth
by Josephine Humphreys
A North Carolina town struggles to preserve its sanity in 1864 as the Civil War approaches to shatter the peace, its Native American community becomes caught between the marauding Union Army and the desperate Home Guard, and sixteen-year-old Rhoda Strong falls in love with outlaw Henry Berry Lowrie. Reprint.
Ivanhoe
by Walter Scott
Retold by Joanne Mattern Wishbone, "a little dog with a big imagination," gives a four-legged tour through Sir Walter Scott's tale of the valiant lvanhoe and his courageous band of friends including Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. One of "the 10 best new kids'shows." --TV Guide "Wishbone is the pick of the litter." --Chicago Tribune
Fluke
by Martin Blinder
So begins the tale of one of the most tragic figures in modern American history, as seen through the rather astigmatic vision of his mistress. In America, anybody can become president. In 1920, anybody did. Harding was a strikingly handsome man, a high school graduate of impenetrable ignorance whose only two qualifications for the presidency were that he looked and sounded presidential - provided you didn't look or listen too closely. Ohio's "favorite son" at the nominating convention, he recognized his deficiencies, did not want such high office, and never expected to be nominated, no less elected. But his destiny was to become the first packaged candidate, elected largely on the strength of a carefully crafted image. Thus began 12 years of Republican rule that fostered unbridled capitalism and willful isolation, leading to the Great Depression and the rise of European dictatorships, which set the stage for World War II. Greatly complicating things was the relationship between Harding and Nan, who shared a deeper intimacy and hotter sex than anything enjoyed by more contemporary White House occupants. But woven around and through their furtive couplings is the tapestry of corruption and scandal generated by a half-dozen uniquely odious presidential cronies. But this tale is not unremittingly bleak. After having been content all of his life to just slide by, Harding reinvented himself in his last year, proving that nobility can triumph over selfishness, that listening to your heart may be more reliable than listening to your head, and that love which is pure can transcend death itself.
The News From Paraguay
by Lily Tuck
For him it began with a bright blue parrot feather that fell from Ella Lynch's hat when she was horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne. The year was 1854, and Francisco Solano Lopez -- "Franco," the future dictator of Paraguay -- began his courtship of the young, beautiful Irishwoman with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. From Paris, Ella Lynch follows Franco to Asunción, where she reigns as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated dream -- one fueled by outsize imperial ambition and heedless arrogance, and with devastating consequences for Paraguay and all its inhabitants. A historical epic that tells an unusual love story, The News from Paraguay offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of nineteenth-century Paraguay, a largely untouched wilderness where Europeans and North Americans intermingle with both the old Spanish aristocracy and native Guaraní Indians. The urgency of the narrative, the imaginative richness of its intimate detail, and the wealth of characters whose stories are skillfully layered and unfolded recall the epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. The News from Paraguay captures the devastating havoc wrought on both a country's fate and a woman's heart by ruthless ambition and war.
Far from the Maddening Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
After an unfortunate marriage to Sergeant Troy and an affair with Farmer Boldwood, Bathsheba Everdene finally becomes the wife of the man who has always loved her, in an authoritative edition of the uncensored 1912 text. Reprint.
|
0 items in cart
Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved. Some content for books is owned by Baker & Taylor, Inc. or its licensors and is subject to copyright and all other protections provided by applicable law.
