New Releases by Peter Carey

Set in nineteenth-century Australia, the story of an unlikely romance between a rebellious Anglican priest and a teenaged heiress who buys a glass factory.

From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business -- and her family -- with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire -- and himself into an angel -- the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky''s Karamozovs. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey''s hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.

The two-time Booker Prize winner now gives us an exceedingly timely, exhilarating novel—at once dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny—that journeys to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international power politics. When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia’s prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons (let’s be honest: as they do in so many parts of her country) the doors of some five thousand jails in the United States also open. Is this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? And does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975? Felix Moore, known to himself as “our sole remaining left-wing journalist,” is determined to write Gaby’s biography in order to find the answers—to save her, his own career, and, perhaps, his country. But how to get Gaby—on the run, scared, confused, and angry—to cooperate? Bringing together the world of hackers and radicals with the “special relationship” between the United States and Australia, and Australia and the CIA, Amnesia is a novel that speaks powerfully about the often hidden past—but most urgently about the more and more hidden present.

Als na dertien jaar haar geheime minnaar en collega sterft, probeert de conservatrice van een museum haar verdriet te verwerken door het leven van de 19e eeuwse Henry Brandling en zijn Duitse speeldoos te ontrafelen.

An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time. London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying eyes in the museum’s Annexe. Usually controlled and rational, but now mad with grief, Catherine reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life. As she begins to piece together the clockwork puzzle, she also uncovers a series of notebooks written by the mechanical creature’s original owner: a nineteenth-century Englishman, Henry Brandling, who traveled to Germany to commission it as a magical amusement for his consumptive son. But it is Catherine, nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in Henry’s story. And it is the automaton, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of creation, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

Man Booker Prize Finalist National Book Award Finalist Two-time Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey’s latest feat of imagination is an irrepressible, audacious, and trenchantly funny novel set mostly in nineteenth-century America. Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is an aristocrat born just after the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver. Their lives are joined when Olivier sets sail for the New World to save his neck from one more revolution and Parrot is sent with him as spy, protector, foe, and foil. With the story of their unlikely friendship, Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy with the dazzling inventiveness and richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.

Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones, and his ''damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother'' Hugh, Theft: A Love Story once again displays Peter Carey''s extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, friendship and redemption.

SOONTO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The international bestseller, Booker Prize winner, and winner of the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Out of 19th century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations: Ned Kelly, the son of poor Irish immigrants, viewed by the authorities as a thief (especially of horses) and, as a cold-blooded killer. To the people, though, he was a patriot hounded unfairly by rich English landlords and their stooges. In the end, Kelly and his so-called gang (his younger brother and two friends) led a massive police manhunt on a wild goose chase that lasted twenty months, in which Ned’s talents as a bushman were augmented by bank robberies and the support of nearly everyone not in a uniform. His one demand – for which he would have surrendered himself was his jailed mother’s freedom. Executed by hanging more than a century ago, speaking as if from the grave, Kelly still resonates as the most potent legend in the land down under.

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.

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.

A decorated writer''s witty, energetic exploration of his home city, told through a monthlong visit.

Seven-year-old Che Selkirk was raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. The son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties, Che has grown up with the hope that one day his parents will come back for him. So when a woman arrives at his front door and whisks him away to the jungles of Queensland, he is confronted with the most important questions of his life: Who is his real mother? Did he know his real father? And if all he suspects is true, what should he do? In this artful tale of a young boy''s journey, His Illegal Self lifts your spirit in the most unexpected way.

Bliss is a masterpiece of illusion that marked Peter Carey''s brilliant debut as a novelist, and was later made into an award-winning film. The dilemma of Harry Joy is both funny and terrifying, for Harry wakes up in Hell, tortured by those he loves, and by the dreams and nightmares he once created for profit. Bliss is a shimmering delight - an acrobatic display of language, character and plot. Peter Carey''s hero is a happy innocent; he remembers his childhood as a Vision Splendid, indulges his wife and children, and is universally regarded as a Good Bloke. Then he dies - only for nine minutes, it''s a heart attack - and wakes up in Hell. His wife is unfaithful, his partner''s a rat, his son pushes drugs, his daughter sells herself, his advertising company promotes products that cause cancer. Against these torments Carey provides a saviour: hippy Honey Barbara, pantheist, healer, whore. Honey is to Harry as Isis is to Osiris. Together they conquer Hell and retire to the forest where their children inherit the legend of paradise regained.

" J''ai perdu mon père à l''âge de 12 ans et je sais ce que c''est d''être élevé dans les mensonges et les silences ma chère fille tu es pour le moment trop jeune pour comprendre un mot de ce que j''écris mais cette histoire est pour toi et ne contiendra pas un seul mensonge que je grille en enfer si je dis faux. " Ainsi écrit le légendaire Ned Kelly, griffonnant son témoignage sur des petits bouts de papier, dans une prose aux fabuleux pouvoirs d''évocation, alors même que la police est à ses trousses. Pour les autorités, Kelly est un voleur et un assassin. Mais pour ses proches, immigrés irlandais sur une terre australienne inhospitalière, le hors-la-loi est un héros qui n''a cessé de défier le pouvoir anglais, aussi arrogant qu''injuste. Vendu par sa mère à un célèbre voleur de chevaux alors qu''il n''était qu''un enfant, Ned a découvert les prisons à l''âge de quinze ans, puis tenté vainement de rentrer dans le droit chemin. À vingt-cinq ans, il est l''homme le plus recherché de la colonie de Victoria, faisant un audacieux pied de nez à la loi - jusqu''au jour de sa capture et de sa pendaison, le 11 novembre 1880. Dans ce western australien tour à tour poignant et comique, écrit dans une langue savoureuse qui rappelle le Mark Twain de Huckleberry Finn, Peter Carey donne une vibrante humanité à Ned Kelly, qui rejoint ici Robin des Bois et Billy the Kid au panthéon des hors-la-loi au grand cœur.

Een man beschrijft in een brief aan zijn dochter hoe hij uitgroeide tot de legendarische negentiende eeuwse Australische volksheld nadat zijn moeder hem verhuurde aan een struikrover.

Carey provides an introduction to all areas of the law relating to print, broadcast and electronic media. This edition includes chapters on IT and the Internet and copyright and moral issues, as well as reflecting recent legislative changes.

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 best of Carey''s short fiction features here, drawn from work published previously in his two anthologies "The Fat Man in History" and "War Crimes".