Oscar and Lucinda: True History of the Kelly Gang

Description

Two novels in one hardback gift volume. Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang by twice Booker winner Peter Carey OSCAR AND LUCINDA is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century England and Australia where the two potential lovers lead parallel lives until chance brings them together on board ship. A narrative tangle of love, religion, gambling, commerce and colonialism culminates in a nightmare expedition - the result of a wager - to transport a glass church across the Australian wilderness. In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself in a voice that is direct, colloquial, theatrical, and utterly magical. To his pursuers he is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying British imperial authority in support of the poor Irish settlers who are its victims. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Carey brings the famous bushranger unforgettably to life.

A novel of extraordinary richness, complexity and strength ... it brings the past, in all its difference, bewilderingly into our present. It fills me with a wild, savage envy and no novelist could say fairer than that. -- Angela Carter There is no greater triumph than fiction which engages with life's tragedy and comedy both, and which acknowledges their inseparability. Oscar and Lucinda accomplishes this. Full of ideas - about religion, about nationhood, about individuality - it is never burdened by them: it is always fixed in the material world, in its endlessly surprising detail. -- Claire Messud * Daily Telegraph *