A Long Way From Home - Hardcover

Neither a road trip nor a state-of-the-nation novel. Instead, it is a domes­tic drama on wheels, an inquiry into the metaphysics of race, and an antic vehicle for Carey's inimitable and lacerating wit... There are other maps that underlay the one that marks the Redex route: maps of murder, of dispossession. Their encounters with indig­enous Australians are tragic, comic and banal.... A Long Way From Home reminds us that great novels are not ideological - neither exploitative nor excessively well-meaning - but tough-minded, complex admissions of failure, guilt and confusion. (The Australian)

'Loud and fleshy and hilarious' (Financial Times)

Intriguing... captures the innocent excitement of the times and tackles head-on Australia's thorny relationship with its Aboriginal population (Mail on Sunday)

'The Australian double Booker Prize-winner returns with a novel of road racing and postcolonial reckoning set in the small-town Victoria of his youth.' (Financial Times)

Longlisted for the 2019 International DUBLIN Literary Award Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together with Willie, their lanky navigator, they embark upon the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey's late style masterpiece; a thrilling high speed story that starts in one way, then takes you to another place altogether. Set in the 1950s in the embers of the British Empire, painting a picture of Queen and subject, black, white and those in-between, this brilliantly vivid novel illustrates how the possession of an ancient culture spirals through history - and the love made and hurt caused along the way.