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Product Description
Peter Carey is one of just three writers to have won the Booker Prize twice and here are both of those prizewinning novels in one volume, showcasing his immense imagination and bravura storytelling.
Oscar and Lucinda is a spectacularly inventive novel set in 19th century Australia, which brings together two apparently polar opposites in a half-mad joint enterprise. Oscar is a nervous Anglican priest who gambles on the instructions of the Divine; Lucinda a teenage heiress who buys a glassworks with her inheritance to help liberate her sex. Their meeting results in a tangle of love, religion and colonialism and culminates in a bizarre expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.
One thing we all remember of Ned Kelly is the famous bulletproof 44kg suit of armour he and his gang employed in police shoot-outs and in True History of the Kelly Gang the legendary outlaw speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative in semi-literate but beautifully descriptive prose as he eludes his pursuers. To them, he is a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying the authority of the English, so much so that following his eventual arrest and conviction in Melbourne over 30,000 people signed petitions demanded clemency. Carey's dazzling act of ventriloquism brings the most celebrated bushranger of them all wildly and passionately to life. 902pp.
