PETER CAREY is the author of thirteen previous novels. In addition to the Booker Prize, his honors include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for more than twenty-five years.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
Longlisted for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award
Shortlisted for Australia’s 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Awarded an Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction

“[A] blast of a novel, so atmospheric that you can smell the burning tyres of the racing cars and sniff the dry eucalyptus leaves. The Redex Trial, a crazy 1950s car race around the continent of Australia, is the hook on which Peter Carey hangs the real story: Willie Bachhuber’s dawning knowledge of who he really is. We live with him as he slowly comes to a deeper understanding of a dreadful crime in his country’s past, and rock with him for thousands of miles through the unforgiving outback on terrible roads with his sparky, furiously energetic, car-mad neighbours, Irene and Titch, who drag him into their wild enterprise. Peter Carey has delved into an agonising episode in Australia’s dark history and brought it to life with humour, deep compassion and writing that surprises and delights on every page.” —Walter Scott Prize jury citation

“Carey’s rollicking, technicolour imagination is at full throttle in his descriptions of the Redex Trial: a bone-rattling and perilous trip around Australia that brings his three companions into contact with the vast continent in a way they have never experienced before. But the resulting journey becomes something far larger, stranger and more powerful than a car race across Australia’s plains: it morphs into an interrogation of what home is, what it can mean, and how history can rarely be settled by maps or narratives found in books. A Long Way from Home shows Carey in high form, balancing the antic and the deadly serious on a knife’s edge, and marks a powerful contribution to his oeuvre.” —2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards jury citation

“Carey offers what might be his most personal work of fiction. . . . Carey has a long concern with Australian history and has never ignored its colonial legacy. What sets A Long Way from Home apart is its level of attention to aboriginal people and whether his handling of the past here represents a potential turn in his work. . . . Being a Canadian studying Australian history is like looking into a distorted mirror: despite the differences, you recognize the face. . . . In A Long Way from Home, all this stuff—all the ways the past is made personal—churns around a question appropriate to a Canadian audience as well.” —The Globe and Mail

“[Irene and Bachhuber], two rich, ripe voices, beautifully realized on the page, are the joy of the novel and at the heart of its achievement—just as Ned Kelly’s voice was at the heart of Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang. The author has such a good ear, such a gift for catching the rhythms of everyday talky, funny rumination, his sentences as crammed with colourful know-how and telling detail as an old attic, or a passage from James Joyce. . . . It’s a Joycean gift indeed, to be able to catch the poetry of the flow of experience in characters who don’t cultivate their poetic sensibility.” —Tessa Hadley, The Guardian

“[A] major work of fiction by the writer who will probably be regarded, in a hundred years, as the leading Australian novelist from the early part of the twenty-first century.” —The Australian Book Review

“A Long Way from Home, like most of Carey’s work, began with an abstract idea that he followed through logically, as if constructing an argument, but springs to life on the page as something loud and fleshy and hilarious. The characters ‘have to be farting and tap dancing’ as he puts it, and here, they are. Though he says he hadn’t particularly planned to make it ‘a laugh a minute all the way to the heart of darkness,’ that’s exactly what the novel delivers.” —Financial Times

“[A] pretty remarkable beast. It starts out appearing to be one sort of thing, then turns into another, then into still another. In that, it represents the Australia that is its ultimate subject—an Australia of violent transformations and concealed histories. . . . [A] wild, magical ride.” —The Telegraph (five stars)

“[W]hat starts out feeling like a typical, jauntily whimsical Peter-Carey-by-numbers soon becomes something more complex and powerful. At the end of the novel, Bachhuber’s son recognizes that his father’s life had been spent wrestling with the problem of the ethical representation of a terrible historical wrong: how to ‘record the truth and keep the secret.’ Carey himself has achieved exactly this, in his best novel in years, maybe decades.” —The Guardian