Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang: Introduction by Paul Giles [Hardcover]

Peter Carey's two Booker Prize-winning novels, in one handsome hardcover volume.

Oscar and Lucinda is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century Australia. Oscar, a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine, joins forces with Lucinda, a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. The resulting narrative tangle of love, commerce, religion, and colonialism culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback. In True History of the Kelly Gang, the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero defying the authority of the English. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Peter Carey brings the famous bushranger wildly and passionately to life.Praise for OSCAR AND LUCINDA:

“It is Thomas Wolfe one is reminded of most when reading Peter Carey . . . They share that magnificent vitality, that ebullient delight in character, detail, and language that turn a novel into an important book.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
 
“The stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of nineteenth-century history.” —TIME
 
“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.” —THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
 
Praise for TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG:

“A spectacular feat of imaginatlC)