Penguin Books Australia

Shortlisted for the 2010 National Book Award (USA) and the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize

'It is like being alive at the time Dickens was writing, I think he's that good. This novel is right up there with his best. It is an amazingly ambitious, ingenious, clever, wonderful book.' Andrew Motion, Chair of the 2010 Man Booker Prize

When the young French aristocrat Olivier is sent to the New World, apparently to study its prisons but in reality to avoid another revolution, Parrot is sent with him. The son of an English printer, Parrot wanted to be an artist but has ended up as a servant. They make an unlikely pair – but as their adventures with love and money, goal and painting show them, there's nowhere better for unlikely things to flourish than in the glorious, brand-new democratic experiment, America.

Carey's most acclaimed novel since True History of the Kelly Gang, Parrot and Olivier in America is a virtuoso portrait of the Old World colliding chaotically with the New. Above all, it is the wildly funny and tender story of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbably work of art.

'Once this novel grabs you, it holds you. Heart as well as brain. A cracking adventure.' Jennifer Byrne, The Age

'Possibly the most charming and engaging novel this demon of a storyteller has yet written.' Paul Auster

'Gorgeously entertaining, and moving . . . A novel of fierce attachments, charting the proximity of beauty and terror in the human soul.' O, The Oprah Magazine

Selected for 'best books of the year' lists by The Australian, The Economist, The New Yorker, Financial Times, Publishers Weekly and The Week.