Fizzing with the fictional panache that has twice won him the Booker prize ... Brilliantly pictorial... a marvellously quirky inventiveness reminiscent of Dickens. [An] exhilarating tour de force
—Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times

... the originality of the writing is so potent that it defies the arbitrary boundaries of literary genre ... What [Carey] does with words: the power and delicacy, the complex orchestration of colour and theme, seems impossible ... But there it is: the glorious supple prose propelling a narrative whose powerful intelligence lends it the strange, inevitable quality of myth.'
—Jane Shilling, The Evening Standard

Peter Carey is a wily seducer, a mental acrobat who can bound across continents and centuries and make us believe in whatever world he has discovered and imagined. Parrot and Olivier transports us to the rough-and-tumble America of 1830, and it's possibly the most charming and engaging novel this demon of a story-teller has yet written. His prose has never been more buoyant, more vigorous, more musical. Open this book and listen to Peter Carey sing
—Paul Auster

...this wonderful novel is picaresque and Dickensian, with humor and insight injected into an accurately rendered period of French and American history
—Starred Review, Publisher's Weekly

Echoes of Tocqueville's masterpiece are matched by intimations of Mark Twain ... a thrillingly fresh and incisive drama of extraordinary personalities set during a time of world-altering vision and action
—Donna Seaman, Booklist, Starred Review

Instantly compelling and with a bone-dry wit ... The slow, subtle transformation of the deeply complicated relationship between master and servant is utterly bewitching. As indeed are all of the relationships of Carey's incredible cast of characters.
—Helen Dargan, The Courier Mail

I have been reading with astonishment and envy Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier ... one memorable tableau after another, striking visual images that burn themselves into the cortex. He is the most exuberant stylist at work in English today.
—Edmund White, The Daily Telegraph

Rare among ageing artists who know their craft, the Australian novelist Peter Carey continues to improvise and experiment at 66, and his recent run of books has been astonishing. Now Parrot and Olivier in America, a comic adventure that functions with equal brilliance as a novel of ideas, can be added to a hit parade of extraordinary sharpness and vigour that includes True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake and Theft: a Love Story.
—Leo Robson, New Statesman

An energetic and expansive novel ....the most sustained and enjoyable attempt yet by Australia's leading living novelist to write about his adopted American homeland.
—Ludovic Hubter-Tilney, The Financial Times

The mingling of hope and pain, loss and rebirth, is captured in the book's wonderfully ambivalent final lines, lines that sing with passion and fury of all that is flawed and all that is wonderful about Carey's adoptive home.
—James Bradley, The Australian

There's nothing timid about Carey... scale of ambition, narrative boldness, apparently inexhaustible imagination and fizzingly exuberant imagery. ... the whole orchestra blowing the roof off.
—John Preston, The Daily Telegraph

[It] is a brilliantly written ... ripsnorter of a yarn that rings all the right bells (character, language, story, dialogue)... feeding backstory into the action with the skill of a fisherman... In its final act, Parrot and Olivier in America reveals itself to be a sneaky little fable about the tenacity of the hustling artist, and how the old roles of master and servant remake themselves in the new light of democracy.
—Peter Murphy, Irish Times

This is Peter Carey at his best: a tour de force, a wonderfully dizzying succession of adventures and vivid, at times caricatured, characters executed with great panache...splendid ... captivating.
—Andrew Reimer, The Sydney Morning

Carey's imagination feels as freshly minted and limitless as ever, be it his eye for detail ... or the novel's panoramic sense of the injustice engendered by social hierarchies and class systems ... his ebullient powers of storytelling ring loud and clear.
—Claire Allfree, Metro UK

I can only assure that once this novel grabs you, it holds you. Heart as well as brain. ...It's the story of a long and improbable friendship, a romance, and a cracking adventure. ... At one level, it is [Peter Carey's] love letter to America, reminding those of us who find the modern empire hard to swallow of the boldness of the original experiment, its drive for change and rebirth....But in using de Tocqueville and his classic Democracy in America as a kind of palimpsest, Carey can rehearse , and in a clever twist, predict , the liabilities of democracy.
—Jennifer Byrne, The Age

one of those comic masterpieces that seems effortless while making you realize that Carey writes some of the best sentences in English.'
—Tom Sleigh, The New Yorker online

Like most of Carey's work, the novel is extraordinarily allusive and joyously inventive. The numerous themes ... are spiced with his gutsy carnality, so that intellectual points become visceral moments. ... Aside from its intellectual themes, Carey's novel is about two characters, and the wary affection that eventually grows between them.
—Lucy Daniel, Daily Telegraph

''Can it be believed,' wrote historian Alexis de Tocqueville after visiting the U.S. in the 1830s, 'that the democracy which has overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before
tradesmen and capitalists?' The question dangles like the sword of Damocles over Peter Carey's exuberantly Dickensian new novel, based loosely on de Tocqueville's life. Carey - who has won the Booker Prize twice - lets master and servant relate their often-boozy and bawdy adventures in alternating chapters, flourishing the language of the period with characteristic zest. Every scene - from the musty chateau in which Olivier is raised to the rich alluvial soil dedicated to 'the industry of onions' in the U.S. - smacks the senses.'
—Helen Brown, Daily Mail

"Parrot and Olivier" has all the quirky qualities that we have come to expect from Peter Carey: a winding narrative, a mass of vivid historical detail, and some very lively writing ... a gripping portrait of Jacksonian America in all its wild variety, from its model farms to its grungy boarding-houses, from its Fourth of July parades to its filthy streets full of copulating pigs..."Parrot and Olivier" is a wonderful tribute to Tocqueville's great book. But it is more than that: it is also a counterblast.
—Daniel Pudles, The Economist

a wily and supremely confident storyteller on a grand scale... Within its covers is a complex discussion of the philosophy of democracy, and yet Olivier and Parrot is most strikingly beautiful at its most elemental.
—Russell Celyn Jones, The Times

Parrot and Olivier in America is such a literary work, even fuller than its predecessors of allusion, contrast and comic contradiction, that there is always more to find: the more you bring to it, the more rewarding its insinuations, its unpredictable switches between satire, serious reflection, and plain fun. Like Oscar and Lucinda (not to mention Carey's other works), it demands and repays repeated reading.
—Tom Shippey, TLS

'I finished it with unabated enjoyment .. a dazzling, entertaining novel.'
—Ursula K LeGuin, The Guardian

Peter Carey is a lyrebird of stunning prowess, a mimic par excellence.
—Robert Epstein, Independent on Sunday

'Novels are not political tracts and must stand alone as works of art if they are to be read and properly appreciated and survive the test of time. In that regard, Carey's is a triumph, his ideas about America translated into a fiction that is reminiscent - in inventiveness if not in style and tone - of Henry James's novels that are concerned with the experience of expatriate Americans in Europe.'
—Alan Taylor, The Herald

Carey dazzles his readers with his literary powers .... In this re-imagining of Alexis de Tocqueville's journey, Carey wakens all the senses.
—Blanche Clarke, Herald Sun (Australia)

'Peter Carey is a master literary ventriloquist ... In this inventive reimagining of de Tocqueville's famous journey across America, evoking the collision of the Old and New Worlds, Carey offers us an exuberant work of fiction full of verve and vivid minor characters. ... a delightful comedy of manners ... This novel takes you on a rollercoaster journey across France, England and America and is never less than entertaining. Be prepared for a rollicking ride.'
—Sebastian Shakespeare, The Tatler

'A delightful and dazzling study of democracy and how it tests Olivier's assumptions of the world.'
—Star Ratings, The Bookseller