A Long Way From Home

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together with Willie, their lanky navigator, they embark upon the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive.

A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey's late style masterpiece; a thrilling high speed story that starts in one way, then takes you to another place altogether. Set in the 1950s in the embers of the British Empire, painting a picture of Queen and subject, black, white and those in-between, this brilliantly vivid novel illustrates how the possession of an ancient culture spirals through history - and the love made and hurt caused along the way.

Neither a road trip nor a state-of-the-nation novel. Instead, it is a domestic drama on wheels, an inquiry into the metaphysics of race, and an antic vehicle for Carey's inimitable and lacerating wit... There are other maps that underlay the one that marks the Redex route: maps of murder, of dispossession. Their encounters with indigenous Australians are tragic, comic and banal.... A Long Way From Home reminds us that great novels are not ideological - neither exploitative nor excessively well-meaning - but tough-minded, complex admissions of failure, guilt and confusion. The Australian

Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. He has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times. He was born in Australia and lives in New York.