Synopses & Reviews
Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning and a handbagful of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing County & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Peter Carey, author of Oscar and Lucinda, creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.
Review
"Peter Carey has an approach to the novel destined to make him one of the most widely read and admired writers working in English." Times Literary Supplement
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"I doubt there will be a more memorable group of characters put on the page this publishing season." Financial Times
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"Glorious entertainment, storytelling at its best, a piece of richly comic invention...mesmerizing." Boston Globe
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"To summarize the novel's characters or its twisted plot is to risk making the book sound simply cartoonish, quirky and grotesque, one given to smirky, easy jokes at its characters' expense....In fact, there's something extremely likable about all this, and especially about the way Mr. Carey gives the combative Catchprices great complexity and depth....Mr. Carey knows how to win us over to a character's side....{He} writes beautiful sentences, worked on but not labored; his descriptive passages sweep us along and leave us insome felicitous, unanticipated place....This pattern of mini-surprises followed by small, jarring pleasures prepares us, phrase by phrase, for the novel's greater rewards for its wit and density, its sympathy and wacky inventiveness and its exhortation to step farther back and see more." The New York Times Book Review
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"A triumph, elegantly written, cunningly constructed, closely observed and deeply disturbing. Peter Carey has confirmed his position as a prince among Australian writers." Daily Mail
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"Peter Carey won the Booker Prize in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda. His new novel is shorter, braver, more painful, and even better." The Times
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"Black as the Earl O'Hell's waistcoat,raging with life, bitter to the bone and absolutely brilliant." Time Out
Synopsis
From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business and her family l with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire and himself into an angel the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.
About the Author
Peter Carey was born in 1943 in Australia and lives in New York. He is the author of a highly acclaimed selection of short stories, The Fat Man in History, and of three novels, Bliss, Illywhacker (shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize) and Oscar and Lucinda (winner of the 1988 Booker Prize).