Oscar and Lucinda

This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in  nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent--a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms--could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.

Winner of the 1988 Booker Prize

The Booker Prize-winning novel--now a major motion picture from Fox Searchlight  Pictures.

This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in  nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent--a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms--could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.

One of our most acclaimed authors, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey s novels temper feats of imagination and language with a solid grounding in history and literature. Through his novels, many of which re-imagine the peopling and history of his native Australia, Carey has garnered renown as a novelist who can write about important subjects in a voice both readable and distinctly challenging.