Awards
Winner of the 1988 Booker Prize
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"A young Australian heiress in bloomers; a gangling youth directed by mischance into the Church of England; both brought together by accident and a mutual obsession with gambling. The history of Oscar Hopkins in the beginning bears a resemblance to that of Edmund Gosse; the story of Lucinda Leplastrier has no such counterpart; nor has the tortured account of the inception and building of the glass church and its journey down the Australian river to its final destination. No other novel has ever depicted 19th-century England and Australia in quite such a grotesque and melodramatic fashion." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"If Illywhacker astounded us with its imaginative richness, this latest Carey novel does so again, with a masterly sureness of touch added." Publishers Weekly
Review
"As fine a love story and as fascinating an exploration as any reader could wish....Carey writes as if the world he has created, and his own private life, are at stake." Chicago Tribune
Review
"The stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th-century history and the millions of painstaking details." Time
Review
"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." Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
This whimsical novel, winner of the 1988 Booker Prize, is set in Victorian England and Australia, is the story of two highly unusual people: Oscar Hopkins, rebellious son of a disciplinarian preacher, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an heiress who has just bought a glass factory. The two meet on shipboard, fall in love, and find that they share an attraction for gambling and for risks a taste that culminates in the precarious conveyance of a crystal church across the rough Australian outback.
About the Author
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.