A Long Way From Home
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2019 International DUBLIN Literary Award
Longlisted 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 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
For his 14th novel, Peter Carey sends a young couple and their neighbour on a thrilling car race around ‘50s Australia—and on a journey of self-discovery. Through his two narrators, Irene Bobs and Willie Bachhuber, Carey builds a vivid, sunburnt Australia: dusty roads, rural living and families crowding around the radio. There’s also innate sexism and government-mandated segregation. (It’s no accident that the most intriguing characters are the whip-smart Mrs Bobs and an indigenous stowaway.) A rambunctiously funny story peppered with sobering realities, A Long Way from Home is an instant classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carey's unfortunate latest (after Amnesia) starts out being about a race and ends up being about race, but it's marred by so many "what's going on here?" moments and convenient plot-changing contrivances that readers will wonder what story Carey's trying to tell, and how. In postwar Australia, car salesman Titch Bobs decides to enter the Redex Trial, a grueling endurance car race around Australia, with the goal of winning and using the ensuing celebrity to open his own dealership. His crew: his wife (and driver) Irene, and his neighbor (and navigator), quiz show champion Willie Bachhuber. Carey takes a lot of time setting up his narrative chess pieces, and it's not long after the race starts (over a third of a way into the novel) that a family tragedy breaks up Titch's crew and eventually sends one of them on a baffling adventure that unearths a life-changing secret and lays bare the shameful history of indignities perpetrated against Aboriginal people. Carey's prose is cutting and often quite funny ("On the far shore stood a moustached white man who should have been told, years ago, don't wear shorts."), but that alone doesn't save the overly shaggy story. This won't go down as one of Carey's better efforts.
