A Long Way From Home

Peter Carey has twice won the Booker Prize for his explorations of Australian history. A Long Way from Home is his late-style masterpiece.

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive.

With them is their navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and tailed schoolteacher whose job it is to call out the hazards on a map that will finally remove them, without warning, from the lily-white Australia they know so well.

This brilliantly vivid, high-speed novel starts in one way and then takes you someplace else. Set in the 1950s amid the consequences of the age of empires, it reminds us how Europeans took possession of a timeless culture – the high purpose they invented and the crimes they committed along the way.