Description of book
Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia's youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story.
Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia.
Peter Carey's visionary brilliance, and his capacity to delight and surprise, propel this story to its stunning conclusion.
Reviews
‘Luminous and magical, OSCAR AND LUCINDA dances with a shimmer of light and dark as its two noble gamblers play out dreams of God and glass. A spectacular achievement.’ Helen Daniel
‘OSCAR AND LUCINDA are two of the most perfectly realised characters in modern fiction. An immensely skilful and absorbing juxtaposition of a gently comic, obliquely ironic, and deeply compassionate vision of human existence.’ David Williamson
‘The most audacious and rewarding of all Carey's novels.’ Geoffrey Dutton
‘Peter Carey is a complete writer. He has all the skills, and knows all the tricks. He can combine a genius for stark, under-stated comedy, with a nearly Dickensian generosity of description; the result is that hardly a character passes through this novel without Carey enlightening us to the peculiarities of physiognomy, psychology and personal history that establish that character's unique and lasting patent over a portion of the reader's memory.’ Aravind Adiga, Second Circle