Oscar and Lucinda

Praise

“We have a great novelist living on the planet with us, and his name is Peter Carey.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
 
“The stuff of shimmering transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th-century history and the millions of painstaking details.”
—Time
 
“A kind of rollercoaster ride . . . .The reader emerges . . . gasping, blinking, reshaped in a hundred ways, conscious that the world is never going to look the same again.”
—The Washington Post Book World
 
Carey luxuriates in language . . . . [Oscar & Lucinda is] a brilliant success.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“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 Times
 
“A commanding writer with laser eye for detail and luxuriant narrative gifts.”
—Wall Street Journal
 
“Peter Carey is to Sydney what Joyce was to Dublin . . . an absolute master of language and storytelling.”
—Thomas Keneally
 
“Carey can write. He is funny, humane, and profound.”
—The Literary Review (London)
 
“The well of talent from which Peter Carey draws his tales produces work as sweet and refreshing as a mineral spring . . . . Carey nears the summit occupied by Borges and Pynchon and a very few others.”
—Harlan Ellison
 
“[Carey] works a literary territory all his own, combining elements of absurdism, black humor, social satire and old-fashioned family saga . . . a pleasure.”
—Miami Herald