Oscar and Lucinda : A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)

Peter Carey’s rich and endlessly inventive tale about two unusual characters in 19th-century Australia won the Booker Prize in 1988. “Peter Carey is to Sydney what Joyce was to Dublin... an absolute master of language and storytelling” (Thomas Keneally).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-19th-century Australia.“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 turns a novel into an important book.” - The New York Times Book Review“[Oscar & Lucinda] is very, very hard to put down. There are many pleasures to be had here, chief among them the author’s gift for telling fascinating, entertaining stories... Like the characters of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, Mr Carey’s creations are real in the simplest human sense.” - Washington TimesPeter Carey is an Australian author who has won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. He has also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize twice (for Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang), and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times (for Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs). He was shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for his entire body of work. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 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.

Winner of the 1988 Booker Prize

EDITORIAL REVIEW: 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. 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. Award winning novel telling the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the boat over to Australia, and discover that they are both obsessive gamblers. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement at Bellingen, some 400 km up the New South Wales coast. Includes deadly encounters with Aboriginal people A rebellious Anglican priest and a teenaged heiress who buys a glass factory in Australia pursue an unlikely romance.