Peter Carey is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished and successful Australian novelists of recent decades and is one of a handful--along with Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, and Tim Winton--who command an international reputation. Carey's novels and short-story collections have won virtually every major literary award in Australia, on many occasions, and his international reputation was confirmed when he won a second Booker Prize in 2001 (the first was in 1988), a feat equaled only by the South African J. M. Coetzee. Though he has lived in New York since 1989, Carey describes himself as an Australian writer, and his books continue to explore Australian history and culture.

Carey is an ambitious and adventurous novelist whose work is consistently risk taking and original. His early stories were influenced by science fiction and his early novels by the modernist fiction of William Faulkner and the magic realism of Gabriel Garc...