Description: Using as a springboard a real literary hoax that transfixed Australia in his boyhood, Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how a phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing him from Melbourne to a seedy, bitter ending in the tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur.
Review Quotes: "My Life as a Fake is so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling." --John Updike, The New Yorker
"Ingenious . . . Carey is as diabolical as the hoaxes that his book includes." -- The New York Times "Brisk, relentlessly prankish. . . . A virtuoso amalgam of styles, simultaneously a literary conundrum of the Borges variety, an exotic adventure tale evocative of both the settings and the narrative methods of Conrad, and a horror story derived from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." --The New York Times Book Review "A wholly absorbing, bizarrely madcap comedy and a telling commentary on the sometimes baffling sources of art. . . . Though fiction, the book is anything but fake. It's truth, beauty and comedy wrapped in one sprightly package." --Chicago Tribune"We have a great novelist living on the planet with us, and his name is Peter Carey."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review "Circling from the real to the imaginary and back is as happily perplexing as a drawing by M.C. Escher. . . . Carey can bring a character to life, give him a voice and a history and a psychological topography, in a single paragraph." --The New York Review of Books "No other Australian writer in our time has succeeded as well as Peter Carey in writing novels that compel the attention of a world-wide audience. His work . . . occupies a high plane of literary brilliance." --The Boston Globe "Peter Carey's new novel comes like a monsoon after drought. It is a magnificent, poetic contemplation of the lying, fakery and insincerity inherent in the act of artistic creation. . . . It's a charismatically furious piece of work, brilliantly meshing its ethical and artistic debate with a rich human drama." --The Times (UK)
"Reads like the impossible offspring of a fictional ménage-à-trois involving Pale Fire, Lord Jim, and Our Man in Havana. . . . A fabulous book in the original sense of the term--and in the other one, too." --The Atlantic Monthly
"In book after book, Peter Carey has proven that he's incapable of writing a dull page. . . . He's one of the greatest storytellers alive. . . . A dazzling narrative." --The Christian Science Monitor "Fast, furious and fantastical. . . . Carey is Australia's finest living novelist." --The Guardian "Carey is that rare artist brave enough to flee success, a tactic that underlies his dazzling track record. Each of his novels sets him a different challenge; in each, he excels. A triumph in its own right, My Life as a Fake leaves us wondering how he's going to delight and disconcert us in his next book." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch "My Life as a Fake is the real thing." --Time "Complex and masterful. . . . A haunting story whose surreal events are as captivating and memorable as the misguided aspirations of its characters." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"In My Life as a Fake, Peter Carey has created a novel that is captivating and haunting, and, in the end, sinfully delightful. For both longtime readers and those coming to his work for the first time, it's a book not to miss." --Richmond Times-Dispatch "Great rollicking fun. . . . A dazzling, beautifully detailed, intellectually energetic book." --The News & Observer (Raleigh)
"My Life as a Fake dazzles the reader with heady ideas and literary reference points (à la Frankenstein and Pale Fire), then catapults us into madcap action. . . . [Carey] exudes a hallucinatory realism that makes imaginary universes feel concrete and believable." --The Village Voice
"A devilishly engrossing meditation on illusion. . . . My Life as a Fake [is] an ingenious homage to the power of the imagination and to Carey's ability to create--and connect--worlds within worlds." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution