A Long Way from Home

An astonishing piece of work: so Peter Carey, and yet completely on its own . . . The places the book goes – well, it’s just wonderful; it feels necessary.

Elizabeth Strout, The Guardian (Australia)

One of his best in recent years . . . a love letter to an Australia that no longer exists.

Stephen Romei, The Australian

A major work of fiction by the writer who will probably be regarded, in a hundred years, as the leading Australian novelist from the early part of the twenty-first century . . . Brilliantly iconoclastic . . . A highly enjoyable reading experience.

Paul Giles, Australian Book Review

A domestic drama on wheels, an inquiry into the metaphysics of race, and an antic vehicle for Carey’s inimitable and lacerating wit . . . 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.

Geordie Williamson, The Australian

A Long Way From Home finds an ingenious way to reflect upon the original sin of dispossession and its ongoing consequences . . . Carey’s enduring fascination with fakes and forgers takes on a new and potent meaning . . . Willie’s experience of deracination and the novel’s admirable undermining of its own nostalgia do not suggest any simple resolution, but they do lead to its necessary and humbling final recognition . . .

James Ley, Sydney Morning Herald

What a brilliant idea, to set a novel about discovering Australia and a self – and a self in relation to Australia – during the gruelling Redex trials . . . Carey is the writer to pull this off . . . [Y]ou can feel his delight in the power and vitality of Aboriginal English . . . not a word wasted, and yet as suited to the storytelling and mythic register, with the ability to range across space and time and compress epic events and tragedies into legend, as any Homeric verse . . . The book is beautiful, layered and resonant, and hard to put down . . . The stunning last sentence of Carey’s novel indicates that there’s a long way to go yet for non-Indigenous Australians in having any idea where we are, no matter what maps we try to make.

Claire Corbett, The Monthly

A funny, humane, and enchanting book that is among his finest.

Jon Day, The New York Review of Books

Of all the novels I’ve read by two-time Booker winner Peter Carey, this one is the best. I romped through it, trying fruitlessly to slow down my reading so that it would never end. Fast-paced, utterly engaging and full of trademark Carey eccentrics, A Long Way from Home is a comic novel which also reveals the slow dawning of Australia’s recognition of its real history . . . Hilarious . . . The narration is inspired.

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

His best novel in years, maybe decades.

Alex Preston, The Guardian (UK)

An ebullient comic caper . . . Intensely engaging in more ways than one, [a] high-octane novel.

Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times (UK)

Not since True History of the Kelly Gang has he seemed so on-song.

Andrew Dickson, Financial Times

Superb . . . A novel of startling scope and real moral and emotional depth . . . A wild, strange, magical ride of a book. (five stars)

Daily Telegraph

Captivating . . . We barrel along anarchically, marvelling at the elegance of Carey’s plotting and the explosive joy of the storytelling . . . Carey turns the novel into a staging ground for his own merciless excavation of Australian history.

The Spectator

Peter Carey deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature for lifting the heart.

The Telegraph (UK)

He’s long been concerned with illegitimacy in the form of (white) confidence tricksters and outlaws . . . but here it’s culturally appropriated falsehoods that are called into question, and ‘horrendous’ deeds brought to light. (four stars)

Lucy Scholes, The Independent (UK)

On-the-road adventure, revisionist history and moral fable . . . a rich narrative stew.

Robert Douglas Fairhurst, The Times (UK)

Peter Carey’s new novel is a pretty remarkable beast . . . Strange, tender, always somehow comical . . . A wild, strange, magical ride of a book.

Sam Leith, The Telegraph (UK)

A moving meditation on multiple forms of paternal failure and the culture of racism that have shaped modern Australia.To give away more would risk spoiling the genuine pleasures.

Patrick Flanery, The Spectator (UK)

A novel full of riches. The road race propels the plot along, but it’s really a book about cultural identity, about family, about the ability to empathise with others. As such, it’s hugely relevant for our times.

Arminta Wallace, Irish Times

I couldn’t have imagined that a car race could be so enthralling.

The Guardian (UK)

This picaresque comedy goes thematically deeper as it heads into the Outback. The antic tone of this 14th novel by Australian-born Carey belies its serious ambition. The comic spirit slyly suggests Shakespeare, an inquiry into identity and the farcical human existence . . . Carey’s novel raises issues of culture and race that carry a thoroughly contemporary charge. (starred review)

Kirkus Reviews

One of Australia’s greatest authors . . . Carey employs both a multi-voice narrative and a continent-spanning car race to emulate the disparate voices and fits and starts that comprise Australia’s history. Highly recommended. (starred review)

Library Journal (US)

The two-time Booker winner is in effervescent form . . . Carey excels in this fizzing, darkly comic novel.

Jason Steger, The Age

Here is the rich and ebullient characterisation that Carey does so well . . . The novel is full of noise and action and extravagant emotion.

Katharine England, The Advertiser (Adelaide)

A high-rev Illywhacker on wheels, both thoughtful and fun.

Jennifer Byrne, Australian Women’s Weekly

What a delightful writer Peter Carey is, and how varied are the delights he offers. A Long Way From Home . . . displays many of the typically polychromatic Carey pleasures. There’s the picaresque plot . . . the fascination with forgery and trickery, secrets hidden and revealed . . . the wedding of a deeply comic vision to an acute sense of how all history . . . is a record of barbarism . . . Above all, though, there’s the supple and musical prose, possessed of a distinct rhythm and filled with flashes of poetic brilliance . . . It’s one of Carey’s best, and boldest, efforts yet.

Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe

With all its inventive momentum, all its pleasurable beats, the fast pace of the race, the scenery unfurling, the novel [is] a journey into Australia’s broken past.

Craig Taylor, New York Times

Each of Carey’s previous novels [is] a milepost on the road leading to this beautiful, beguiling and at times heartbreaking book.

Toronto Star

Highly entertaining . . . an extraordinary ear for language and the ability to capture his characters’ styles of speech.

Christian Science Monitor

A Great Australian Epic in picaresque form . . . A Long Way from Home is a frolic with depth, a flight of fancy with tough resonance.

Seattle Times

Carey has given history a face and made it personal . . . It’s not often such an intelligent and well written book comes along, but this is a great one about a difficult subject.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Peter Carey’s readers never know just where they will end up when they open one of his books . . . Everything Carey undertakes in A Long Way From Home is accomplished with clarity and elegance . . . A major work and an exciting one.

Helen T. Verongos, St Louis Post Despatch