Peter Carey Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Bliss (1981)
  2. Illywhacker (1985)
  3. Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
  4. The Tax Inspector (1991)
  5. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994)
  6. The Big Bazoohley (1995)
  7. Jack Maggs (1997)
  8. True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
  9. My Life as a Fake (2003)
  10. Theft (2006)
  11. His Illegal Self (2008)
  12. Parrot and Olivier in America (2009)
  13. The Chemistry of Tears (2012)
  14. Amnesia (2014)
  15. A Long Way From Home (2017)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Fat Man In History / Exotic Pleasures (1974)
  2. War Crimes (1979)
  3. Collected Stories (1995)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. 30 Days in Sydney (2001)
  2. Wrong About Japan (2004)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Peter Carey Books Overview

Bliss

This novel, by the author of ‘Oscar and Lucinda’, tells the story of a man who, recovering from death, is convinced that he is in hell. For the first time in his life, Harry Joy sees the world as it really is, and takes up a notebook to explore and notate the true nature of the Underworld.

Illywhacker

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 espcially 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.

Oscar and Lucinda

The Booker Prize winning novel now a major motion picture from Fox Searchlight Pictures. This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.

The Tax Inspector

Granny Catchprice runs her family business and her family with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Peter Carey, author of Oscar and Lucinda, creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

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 Big Bazoohley

With only 50 dollars to their name, Sam and his family arrive in Toronto to sell his mother’s latest painting. Sam is locked out of his hotel room, then kidnapped, and soon finds himself entered for a ‘perfect child’ competition, for which the prize is an enormous cheque.

Jack Maggs

Jack Maggs is a dazzling tale of obsession, and Jack Maggs stands as a remarkable character, a resurrected antipodean lag returned to England for vengeance and reconciliation.’ Thomas Keneally 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. ‘Imaginative and audacious…
A twentieth century, post colonial Dickens novel…
This strange, bold, gripping, and wonderful novel is the story of a power struggle, a double love story, a quest story, and a story of trickery and disguise. It’s about taking possession of an inheritance, of another person’s soul, of your own destiny and being taken possession of. Not least, it’s the story of one writer’s being possessed by another.’ Hermione Lee, The Observer ‘Uncommonly exciting and engaging. As much as anyone now writing, Peter Carey is a master of storytelling. His empathy with his characters, combined with his psychological sharp sightedness, has them almost jumping off the page in full human complexity. An especial bonus is his style…
Vivid, exact, unexpected images and language match the quick, witty intelligence flickering through this novel, and make it a triumph of ebullient indictment, humane insight, and creative generosity.’ Peter Kemp, Sunday Times London ‘Writing and philosophical contemplations of the highest order…
On a par with, and more interesting than, his two earlier masterpieces…
An absorbing, beautifully written novel finished off with a most satisfactory happy ending, and with incidents, an atmosphere, and ideas that linger in the mind.’ Carmen Callil, The Daily Telegraph

True History of the Kelly Gang

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.

My Life as a Fake

Following the triumph of his Booker Prize winning True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey ventures into the Far East with a novel shot through with mysteries at once historical, literary, and personal. Sarah Wode Douglass, the editor of a London poetry magazine, had grown up knowing the famous and infamous John Slater. And because he figured prominently in the disaster that was her parents marriage, when Slater proposes that she accompany him to Malaysia, Sarah embarks out of curiosity on a journey that becomes, instead, a lifelong obsession. Her discoveries spiral outward from Christopher Chubb, a destitute Australian she meets by chance in the steamy, fetid city of Kuala Lumpur. He is mad, Slater warns her, explaining the ruinous hoax Chubb had committed decades earlier. But lurking behind the man’s peculiarity and arrogance, Sarah senses, is artistic genius, in the form of a manuscript he teases her with and which she soon would do anything to acquire. The provenance of this work, she gradually learns, is marked by kidnapping, exile, and death a relentless saga that reaches from Melbourne to Bali, Sumatra, and Java, and that more than once compels her back to Malaysia without ever disclosing all of its secrets, only the power of the imagination and the price it can exact from those who would wield it. Astonishing, mesmerizing, and ultimately shocking, My Life as a Fake is the most audacious novel yet in Peter Carey s extraordinary career.

Theft

Ferocious and funny, penetrating and exuberant, Theft is two time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey’s master class on the things people will do for art, for love…
and for money. I don t know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of sh*itty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the sh*itty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight year old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard…
So begins Peter Carey s highly charged and lewdly funny new novel. Told by the twin voices of the artist, Butcher Bones, and his damaged two hundred and twenty pound brother Hugh, it recounts their adventures and troubles after Butcher s plummeting prices and spiralling drink problem force them to retreat to New South Wales. Here the formerly famous artist is reduced to being a caretaker for his biggest collector, as well as nurse to his erratic brother. Then the mysterious Marlene turns up in Manolo Blahniks one stormy night. Claiming that the brothers friend and neighbour owns an original Jacques Liebovitz, she soon sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making or ruin of them all. Displaying Carey s extraordinary flare for language, Theft is a love poem of a very different kind. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo and exploring themes of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption this great novel will make you laugh out loud. From the Hardcover edition.

His Illegal Self

Two time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self crackles with passionate, electrifying prose and characters that leap off the page and into your psyche. Utterly captivating. It is 1972 and Ch , a precocious seven almost eight year old boy, leads a rather bourgeois life on Park Avenue with his eccentric grandmother. His parents are young radicals in hiding from the FBI he has never even met his father and he last saw his mother at the age of two. Ch is ecstatic when a woman called Dial who he believes is his mother appears at his front door to take him out for lunch. They skip the meal and Dial whisks Ch off on a serpentine adventure, luring him with the promise of a big surprise and the idea that he has finally found someone to love. Eventually they find themselves stranded on a turbulent hippie commune in Australia, a lonely boy and a reluctant kidnapper with no one to rely on but each other. His Illegal Self is a love story like no other. Simultaneously sinister and endearing, the incomparable perspectives and vividness of the characters voices are mesmerizing. It is impossible not to be moved by the openness and innocence of this young boy, and by his willingness and inherent need to love and to trust anyone and everyone as he seeks out his parents. From the Hardcover edition.

Parrot and Olivier in America

From the two time Booker Prize winning author: an irrepressible, audacious, trenchantly funny new novel set in the 19th century and inspired in part by the life of Alexis de Tocqueville. With dazzling exuberance and all the richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer, Peter Carey explores the birth of democracy, the limits of friendship and whether people really can remake themselves in a New World. The two men at the heart of the novel couldn’t be any more different: Olivier is the son of French aristocrats who barely survived the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerate English printer. But when young Parrot is separated from his father after a stupendous conflagration at a house of forgery he runs into the powerful embrace of a one armed marquis who will be his conduit like it or not into a life as closely misallied with Olivier’s as if they were connected by blood. And when Olivier sets sail for America ostensibly to make a study of the American penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from the latest guillotineurs Parrot, unable to loosen the Marquis’s grip, is there too: as spy, scribe, comptroller, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative unfurls, shifting between the perspectives of Olivier and Parrot, between their picaresque adventures apart and together, in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold.

The Fat Man In History / Exotic Pleasures

One of Australia’s most highly regarded novelists…
accomplished, surehanded.’ NewsdayIf, in some post Marxist utopia, obesity were declared counterrevolutionary, how would a houseful of fat men strike back? If it were possible to win a new body by lottery, what kind of people would choose ugliness? If two gun toting thugs decided to take over a business and run it through sheer terror how far would their methods take them?These are the questions that Peter Carey, author of The Tax Inspector and Oscar and Lucinda, brilliantly explores in this collection of stories. Exquisitely written and thoroughly envisioned, the tales in The Fat Man in History reach beyond their arresting premises to utter deep and often frightening truths about our brightest and darkest selves.’Destined to be one of the most widely read and admired writers working in English.’ Edmund White, The Times Literary Supplement London’Marvelous!’ Boston Globe

30 Days in Sydney

This is a fabulously idiosyncratic small masterpiece…
it’s so good it takes your breath away. Times UK

After living abroad for years, novelist Peter Carey returns home to Sydney and attempts to capture its character. Seeking the help of his old friends, Carey is soon drawn into their strange, anarchic worlds, each one orbiting the place he has come back to see. The result is a wild and wonderful journey of discovery and rediscovery as bracing as the southerly bluster that sometimes batters Sydney s shores. Famous sights such as Bondi Beach, the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the Blue Mountains all take on a strange new intensity when exposed to the penetrating gaze of the author and his friends.

30 Days in Sydney offers the reader an enchanting glimpse behind the facades and the Venetian blinds of the city.

Wrong About Japan

Previous winner of two Booker Prizes, Peter Carey expands his extraordinary achievement with each new novel but now gives us something entirely different.

When famously shy Charley Carey becomes obsessed with Japanese manga and anime, Peter is not only delighted for his son, but entranced himself. Thus, with a father sharing his twelve year old’s exotic comic books, begins a journey that will lead them both to Tokyo, where a strange Japanese boy will become both their guide and judge. The visitors quickly plunge deep into the lanes of Sh*itimachi into the weird stuff of modern Japan meeting manga artists and anime directors, visualists who painstakingly impersonate cartoons, and solitary otakus who lead a computerized existence. What emerges from these encounters is a pithy, far ranging study of history and culture both high and low from samurai to salaryman, from kabuki theatre to the post war robot craze. Peter Carey s observations are provocative, even though his hosts often point out, politely, that he is Wrong About Japan. In adventures that are comic, surprising, and ultimately moving, father and son cope with and learn from each other in a place far from home.

No Real Japan, said Charley. You ve got to promise. No temples. No museums.

What could we do?

We could buy cool manga.

There ll be no English translations.

I don t care. I d eat raw fish.

excerpt from Wrong About Japan

From the Hardcover edition.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment