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.
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"We have a great novelist living on the planet with us, and his name is Peter Carey."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review "The stuff of shimmering transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th-century history and the millions of painstaking details."
--Time "A kind of rollercoaster ride . . . .The reader emerges . . . gasping, blinking, reshaped in a hundred ways, conscious that the world is never going to look the same again."
--The Washington Post Book World Carey luxuriates in language . . . . [Oscar & Lucinda is] a brilliant success."
--San Francisco Chronicle "It is Thomas Wolfe one is reminded of most when reading Peter Carey . . . they share that magnificent vitality, that ebullient delight in character, detail and language that turns a novel into an important book."
--The New York Times Book Review "[Oscar & Lucinda] is very, very hard to put down. There are many pleasures to be had here, chief among them the author's gift for telling fascinating, entertaining stories . . . . Like the characters of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, Mr. Carey's creations are real in the simplest human sense."
--Washington Times "A commanding writer with laser eye for detail and luxuriant narrative gifts."
--Wall Street Journal "Peter Carey is to Sydney what Joyce was to Dublin . . . an absolute master of language and storytelling."
--Thomas Keneally "Carey can write. He is funny, humane, and profound."
--The Literary Review (London) "The well of talent from which Peter Carey draws his tales produces work as sweet and refreshing as a mineral spring . . . . Carey nears the summit occupied by Borges and Pynchon and a very few others."
--Harlan Ellison "[Carey] works a literary territory all his own, combining elements of absurdism, black humor, social satire and old-fashioned family saga . . . a pleasure."
--Miami Herald
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Peter Carey was born in 1943 in Bacchus Marsh, Australia, and was educated at Geelong Grammar School. He is the author of a collection of stories and five novels. He lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.
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