A Long Way from Home

Description

Australia's master novelist takes us on the race of a lifetime. Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher whose job it is to call out the turns, the grids, the creek crossings on a map that will finally remove them, without warning, from the lily-white Australia they know so well. This thrilling, high-speed story starts in one way and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, the more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner, even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves. Set in the 1950s amid the consequences of the age of empires, this brilliantly vivid and lively novel reminds us how Europeans took possession of a timeless culture - the high purpose they invented and the crimes they committed along the way. Peter Carey has twice won the Booker Prize for his explorations of Australian history. A Long Way from Home is his late-style masterpiece.

Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh Australia and lives in New York City. His novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times and have won it twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang). Carey has also won the Commonwealth prize twice and Australia's Miles Franklin three times. He is an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In his 28 years living in New York he has produced classic works of Australian literature including True History of the Kelly Gang and A Long Way from Home. Since 2003 he has been a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College in New York where he is the Executive Director of a highly selective MFA in Creative Writing. Peter Carey supports the Bushwick literacy group 'Still Waters in a Storm' www.stillwatersinastorm.org, a refuge for immigrant kids in the age of Trump. He is married to the literary agent Frances Coady.