ALong Way From Home

Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. He has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times. He was born in Australia and lives in New York.Longlisted for the 2019 International DUBLIN Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together they embark upon the Redex Trial, a brutal car race around the continent, over roads no car can ever quite survive.

Set during the 1950s in the dying embers of the British Empire, A Long Way from Home is a thrilling high-speed story, illuminating a country's relationship with its own ancient culture, and the love made and hurt caused along the way.The late style masterpiece from Peter Carey, twice winner of the Booker Prize.Superb . . . A wild, strange, magical ride of a book.Surely Australia's greatest living novelist . . . Peter Carey's best novel in years, maybe decades.I couldn't imagine that a car race could be so enthralling . . . Two rich, ripe voices, beautifully realised on the page, are the joy of the novel and at the heart of its achievement.A writer at full throttle: Australia's grim past collides with a gruelling car race in Peter Carey's high-octane novel.Carey's eye for zestful storytelling is as sharp as ever . . . Loud and fleshy and hilarious.'The 14th novel by the two-time Booker-winner starts as a rattling good tale about a race and ends as a painful meditation on race itself. In between, there are 10,000 miles of Australian terrain to navigate and centuries of buried, bloody history. The narrative does a sudden, handbrake turn, and you may feel the book has lost its way, but in the hands of such a skilful driver no detour is entirely wasted.''The double Booker prize-winning author returns to the remote country towns of his youth in a novel which touches upon his complicated relationship with race as a white Australian for the first time. Set in the 1950s, the novel follows Irene Bobs and her husbnd as they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal motor race around the Australian outback, "over roads no car will ever quite survive". "I couldn't have imagined that a car race could be so enthralling," says the Guardian's Tessa Hadley.''Australia's most eminent novelist at last tackles his country's relationship with its indigenous past in this rip-roaring tale of escape across the outback. Willie embarks on the Redex Trial, a gruelling Aussie car race, but soon finds himself in Aboriginal territory, where he makes an unsettling series of discoveries that force him to re-examine who he is.''As peppy little Irene Bobs and her equally dynamic and diminutive husband, Titch, embark on a 1950s car-race-cum-endurance-test around Australia, things seem set for an ebullient comic caper. Verbal brio and sunny, funny scenes abound. But gradually the free-wheeling jaunt enters darker territory. Location quivers with sombre significance as reminders of atrocities at the core of Australia's colonial history emerge.'It's 1953. An enterprising young Australian couple decide to publicise their new garage business by entering the Redex Trial, a real event in which ordinary cars were raced across the Australian outback. But dark secrets from the country's colonial past lurk by the wayside.