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  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780143571261
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 800
  • RRP: $22.99

Illywhacker




Peter Carey's brilliant, hilarious, Booker Prize-shortlisted Illywhacker is the novel that brought him to international intention.

Herbert Badgery is vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch. He might very well be the embodiment of Australia's national character, especially in its fondness for tall stories and questionable history. As this charming scoundrel traverses the continent and a century's worth of outlandish encounters – not least with a genteel dowager fending off madness with an electric belt, and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts – one truth emerges. Herbert Badgery may in fact be the king of all con men.

'Illywhacker is such an astonishing novel, of such major proportions, that before saying anything else, one must record gratitude for its existence.' Geoffrey Dutton, The Bulletin

'A book of awesome breadth, ambition, and downright narrative joy . . . A triumph.' Washington Post Book World

'Carey can spin a yarn with the best of them . . . A big, garrulous, funny novel.' Howard Jacobson, New York Times Book Review

'it is impossible to convey in a review the cumulative brilliance and accelerating hilarity of the prose.' London Review of Books

'The finest and funniest picaresque novel yet written in Australia.' National Times

  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780143571261
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 800
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Peter Carey

Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and now lives in New York. He is the author of fourteen novels (including one for children), two volumes of short stories, and two books on travel. Amongst other prizes, Carey has won the Booker Prize twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize twice (for Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang), and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times (for Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs). He is an officer of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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