Description: Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Together they enter the 1954 Redex Trial, a weeks-long endurance contest of a car race that circles the entire continent. With them is their lanky, fair-haired navigator: deposed quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher Willie Bachhuber. If they win the Redex, the Bobs name alone will get them a dealership, and Willie will have recharged a life currently ground to a halt. But before any of that might happen, their official strip maps will lead them, without warning, out of the comfortable white Australia they know so well. A breakneck, often hilarious, eye-opening adventure that at the same time reminds us how white people took possession of a timeless culture--the high purpose they invented, and the crimes they committed along the way--A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey's late-style masterpiece.
Review Quotes: "Delightful. . . . Thrilling. . . . One of Carey's best, and boldest, efforts yet." --The Boston Globe
"Propulsive. . . . Free-flowing. . . . Using a wild road race, [Carey has] found a journey into Australia's broken past." --The New York Times Book Review "A rambunctious adventure story [transforms] into a potent exploration of racial identity." --The New Yorker"A funny, humane, and enchanting book that is among his finest." --The New York Review of Books "A profound and poignant story." --The Washington Post
"Highly entertaining. . . . Carey demonstrates an extraordinary ear for language." --The Christian Science Monitor
"Complex and powerful. . . . His best novel in years, maybe decades." --The Guardian "Carey's eye for zestful storytelling is as sharp as ever --as is his ventriloquist's ear. . . . Not since True History of the Kelly Gang has he seemed so on-song." --Financial Times
"A rollicking adventure [that] leads to a startling exchange of worlds. Bigotries are confronted. Hidden histories are revealed. . . . A Long Way from Home is a frolic with depth, a flight of fancy with tough resonance." --The Seattle Times
"A major work and an exciting one. . . . Deep and affecting." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Evocative and exciting . . . Rip-roaring colour and action . . . this is the first time he's directly dealt with Aboriginal history, and A Long Way From Home is all the more powerful for it."
--The Independent (London) "An ebullient comic caper. . . . Intensely engaging. . . . [A] high-octane novel." --The Sunday Times (London) "Remarkable. . . . Strange, tender, always somehow comical . . . A wild, strange, magical ride of a book." --The Telegraph (London) "We barrel along anarchically, marvelling at the elegance of Carey's plotting and the explosive joy of the storytelling. . . . A moving meditation on multiple forms of paternal failure and the culture of racism that have shaped modern Australia." --The Spectator (London) "Intriguing. . . . Compelling. . . . Surely fiction's role is to provide both writer and reader with the kind of empathy only accessible via an imagination as generous and serious as that of a writer such as Peter Carey." --The New Statesman "Breaks new ground. . . . There is a sense of venturing into virgin territory, of a country opening up, of a reckoning, of long overdue discovery." --Herald Scotland
"A Long Way from Home is 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." --Irish Times