In this dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny novel, two-time Booker winner Peter Carey takes us to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international politics. When Gaby Baillieux, Australia’s most formidable hacker, releases the Angel Worm virus into her country’s prison system, cell doors are opened and inmates walk free. Since those prisons use American software, the doors in thousands of jails in the United States are opened as well. Is this an accident—or a declaration of cyber war? Does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975?
Disgraced writer Felix Moore—known to himself as “our sole remaining left-wing journalist”—is determined to write Gaby’s biography in order to find the answers that could save her, his career, and perhaps his country. But how to get Gaby—on the run, scared, confused, and angry—to cooperate?

The two-time Booker Prize winner now gives us an exceedingly timely, exhilarating novel—at once dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny—that journeys to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international power politics.

When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia’s prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons (let’s be honest: as they do in so many parts of her country) the doors of some five thousand jails in the United States also open. Is this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? And does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975? Felix Moore, known to himself as “our sole remaining left-wing journalist,” is determined to write Gaby’s biography in order to find the answers—to save her, his own career, and, perhaps, his country. But how to get Gaby—on the run, scared, confused, and angry—to cooperate?

Bringing together the world of hackers and radicals with the “special relationship” between the United States and Australia, and Australia and the CIA, Amnesia is a novel that speaks powerfully about the often hidden past—but most urgently about the more and more hidden present.

“A rollicking tour-de-force.” —The Boston Globe

“Deeply engaging. . . . No other contemporary novelist is better able to mix farce with ferocity, or to better effect.” —The Guardian (London)

“Ambitious and urgent.” —New York magazine

“Carey is a master craftsman. . . . [Amnesia is] a work with the power to vibrate after we’ve closed the covers.” —The Plain Dealer

“Compelling, written with the vivid precision that marks Mr. Carey’s best work. It appears at first as though he might, like Thomas Pynchon in Bleeding Edge or Dave Eggers in The Circle, be attempting to recreate the constantly shifting virtual world in the fixed text of a novel. But humanity, not machinery, lies at the book’s heart.” —The Economist

“Peter Carey is no mean stylist. . . . His pages will always yield their pleasures. . . . You can pick any page at random and locate an energy that never seems to flag.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Nestled inside this brisk cyber caper is an aesthetically daring character study. . . . Carey imbues [the hacker’s] immersion in the world of coding and the Internet with a palpable, engrossing sense of joy and discovery.” —The New Yorker

“Explores journalistic freedom, the ethics of radicalism as practiced on the internet and other complex contemporary issues.” —The New York Daily News

“Visionary, fiercely smart, and illuminating, and timely. . . . In a literal and figurative way, it’s testimony. In all ways, Amnesia is hard to forget.” —The Buffalo News

“Fantastically brilliant, gripping and astonishing.” —Hermione Lee, author of Penelope Fitgerald and Edith Wharton

“Lyrical, profane, highly readable. . . . Blends conspiracy thriller, comic farce and an examination of contemporary hackers.” —Financial Times

“The story of WikiLeaks as if transmogrified by Dickens and turned into a thrilling fable for our post-Edward Snowden era. Written with forensic precision.” —Luke Harding, The Guardian

“Vividly and precisely evoke[d]. . . . The thrill, illicit and almost erotic, of the early possibilities of the internet is . . . beautifully delineated. . . . A techno-Bildungsroman welded into a meta-fictional conspiracy thriller.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“A witty and subversive account of three richly drawn eccentrics and Australia’s gradual capitulation to the blandly murderous corporate ethos.” —The Toronto Star

“Amnesia is blunt and funny, brave and outspoken. . . . Entertaining, provocative. . . . If fiction can summon the now, this novel has.” —The Irish Times

“Peter Carey, like John le Carre, has an uncanny knack of timeliness. . . . The novel moves like wildfire. . . . Reconfigures life and times into provocative fictional form that we might better ponder who we are and what we might—or must—do next.” —Sydney Morning Herald

Amnesia

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