He studied chemistry at Monash University for just a year before leaving to work in advertising. This postcolonial undertaking has sometimes led Carey to wrestle with the great works of English literature: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) draws on Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, while Jack Maggs (1997), a version of Dickens's Great Expectations, is told from the perspective of the convict who returns to England from Australia.īut although Carey went to what he calls 'a particularly posh' Australian boarding school, he claims he didn't discover literature until he was out of school. 'My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country,' the prizewinning Australian author Peter Carey has said. Currently-lives in New York City, New York, USA.(thrice) Prix duMeilleur Livre Etranger Colin Roderick Award Awards-Booker Prize (twice) National Book Council Award Ĭommonealth Writers Prize (twice) Franklin Miles Award.Where-Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia.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. 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. This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia.

Oscar and lucinda review