An Unstable Element

Here are the facts of the writer’s life: a childhood spent above the spare-parts department of his parents’ car dealership in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria.

A stint as a boarder at the gothic Geelong Grammar; he arrived just after Rupert Murdoch and a little before King Charles. A doomed obsession with chemistry.

The hippie years in Queensland rainforest.

An antic career in advertising. (He was still attached to one of the world’s great tinned-tuna accounts
when writing his first Booker winner.)

An Unstable Element is the account of a most unconventional literary life. In these pages, we experience the creation of visionary fictions, their reception and the reality of a master’s confidence and doubt. Being the work of Peter Carey, it is electrically made: layered, gleeful, open, alive and vibrating with the themes that have defined his work – outsiders, rebels, empire; Australia, England, America; history, memory and love. It is a living, breathing example, too, of the exuberant, heart-lifting invention that defines his genius.