Amnesia [Paperback]

In this dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny novel, two-time Booker winner Peter Carey takes us to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international politics. When Gaby Baillieux, Australia’s most formidable hacker, releases the Angel Worm virus into her country’s prison system, cell doors are opened and inmates walk free. Since those prisons use American software, the doors in thousands of jails in the United States are opened as well. Is this an accident—or a declaration of cyber war? Does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975?
       Disgraced writer Felix Moore—known to himself as “our sole remaining left-wing journalist”—is determined to write Gaby’s biography in order to find the answers that could save her, his career, and perhaps his country. But how to get Gaby—on the run, scared, confused, and angry—to cooperate?

“A rollicking tour-de-force.” —The Boston Globe

“Deeply engaging. . . . No other contemporary novelist is better able to mix farce with ferocity, or to better effect.” —The Guardian(London)

“Ambitious and urgent.” —New Yorkmagazine
 
“Carey is a master craftsman. . . . [Amnesiais] a work with the power to vibrate after we’ve closed the covers.” —The Plain Dealer

“Compelling, written with the vivid precision that marks Mr. Carey’s best work. It appears at first as though he might, like Thomas Pynchon inBleeding Edgeor Dave Eggers inThe Circle, be attempting to recreate the constantly shifting virtual world in the fixed text of a novel. But humanity, not machinery, lies at the book’s heart.” —The Economist

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