“Wildly entertaining …. Clever, amusing, absorbing, a Christmas pudding stuffed not with nuts and raisins and candied peel [but] with dark, succulent, dense, pungent, knobbly, inscrutable characters every one of whom might have come from a Dickens novel.”
—The New York Review of Books
“A profound exploration of the intertwinings of fiction and life, and of the magic frauds that fiction commits on life … a ravishing book.”
—Geoffrey Dutton, The Australian
“Writing and philosophical contemplations of the highest order . . . On a par with, and more interesting than, his two earlier masterpieces . . . An absorbing, beautifully written novel finished off with a most satisfactory happy ending, and with incidents, an atmosphere, and ideas that linger in the mind.”
—Carmen Callil, The Daily Telegraph (London)
“As always, Mr. Carey writes with energy and fantastic inventiveness.”
—The New York Times
“Radiant. Peter Carey’s narrative rushes like a great stream toward a glittery falls, gathering momentum as it rolls.”
—The Boston Globe
“Imaginative and audacious . . . A twentieth-century, post-colonial Dickens novel . . . This strange, bold, gripping, and wonderful novel is the story of a power struggle, a double love story, a quest story, and a story of trickery and disguise. It’s about taking possession–of an inheritance, of another person’s soul, of your own destiny–and being taken possession of. Not least, it’s the story of one writer’s being possessed by another.”
—Hermione Lee, The Observer
“A work of extraordinary inventive energy, hazarding territory where few writers dare go.”
—Helen Daniel, The Age
“Uncommonly exciting and engaging. As much as anyone now writing, Peter Carey is a master of storytelling. His empathy with his characters, combined with his psychological sharp-sightedness, has them almost jumping off the page in full human complexity. An especial bonus is his style . . . Vivid, exact, unexpected images and language match the quick, witty intelligence flickering through this novel, and make it a triumph of ebullient indictment, humane insight, and creative generosity.”
—Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
“An original and freestanding performance, replete with the sorts of twists and shocks and coincidences that originally gave page turners a good name.”
—Time
“The Australian-born Carey is best known for Oscar and Lucinda, an ethereal novel recently made into a movie starring Ralph Fiennes. But from now on he should be known for the meatier Jack Maggs.”
—Daily News
“A rousing old-fashioned narrative. . . . [that] stands on its own as an adventure story.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Jack Maggs is an ingenious trick box of a novel, alternately tough and tender … Ambitious, masterfully-paced …It is great galloping fun to enter ‘a world as rich as London itself.’”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“This is Carey’s sixth novel and his most accessible. He obviously wrote it with entertainment in mind, and he hits the mark on every page. “
—People
“Throughout this tale of mesmerism, romance, and deceit, he posits weighty questions pertaining to guilt, innocence, self-creation and ownership of thought and memory. As provocative as these questions are, they provide only the background music for Carey’s center stage performance.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Mr. Carey creates a startling pastiche of Dickensian London, a city gurgling with violence and corruption, suffused with the stench of sulfur and soot.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“There’s all kinds of fun to be had in Australian Peter Carey’s newest novel. Some of it lies right on the surface – in Carey’s economical yet robust conjuration of the sights, sounds, smells and feel of Victorian London from its streets to its snuggeries, through the interrelationships of conventions and crimes.”
—The Nation
“[Jack Maggs] is a tour de force with the force intact, a Victorian novel set in the 1830s that reads as if it takes place in the 1990s… A superb novel, pure pleasure.”
—Men’s Journal
“When the author is having a good time, the joy with which the words were written reverberates as they are read. Such is the case with Peter Carey[‘s] Jack Maggs: One assumes it was as much fun to write as it is to read.”
—The News & Observer
“Everything that can happen does in Jack Maggs and the story is certain to keep you spellbound … You shouldn’t plan on leaving your chair until you’re finished.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Jack Maggs, in capable hands, has all the makings of a spellbinding cinematic adventure –murder, deception, erotic intrigue and a race against time. Jack Maggs is a remarkable novel.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Jack Maggs is full of cruelty, goodness, merriment and terror, mysterious inheritances, plot-driving coincidences and sharp-eyed generalizations about segments of the endlessly proliferating human species. Carey just ‘wants to make your flesh creep,’ and he’s done a rattling good job.”
—GQ