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'ILLYWHACKER is such an astonishing novel, of such major proportions, that before saying anything else one must record gratitude for its existence.' Geoffrey Dutton, Bulletin In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character - especially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies.As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, ILLYWHACKER is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.

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9781741660227

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Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh Australia and lives in New York City. His novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times and have won it twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang). Carey has also won the Commonwealth prize twice and Australia's Miles Franklin three times. He is an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In his 28 years living in New York he has produced classic works of Australian literature including True History of the Kelly Gang and A Long Way from Home. Since 2003 he has been a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College in New York where he is the Executive Director of a highly selective MFA in Creative Writing. Peter Carey supports the Bushwick literacy group 'Still Waters in a Storm' www.stillwatersinastorm.org, a refuge for immigrant kids in the age of Trump. He is married to the literary agent Frances Coady.

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