“We have a great novelist living on the planet with us, and his name is Peter Carey.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
‘Luminous and magical, Oscar and Lucinda dances with a shimmer of light and dark as its two noble gamblers play out dreams of God and glass. A spectacular achievement.’
—Helen Daniel, The Age
“Destined to [be] one of the most widely read and admired writers working in English.”
—Edmund White, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Wonderful is the only word adequate to the imagination that begot, and the assurance that controls this richly comic novel.”
—Don Anderson, The Sydney Morning Herald
“Bursting with informed gusto, freewheeling comedy, pauses of pathos and moments of surreal poetry – swaggering streetboys ‘with their hands boasting against their braces,’ scared cockatoos flying up ‘like screeching feathers from a burst pillow’ – Oscar & Lucindais a creative explosion of delight at life’s wayward, diverse plentifulness.”
—Peter Kemp, Sunday Times (London)
“Genius is a devalued, overworked word, but make no mistake about it, in that department Peter Carey has been richly blessed.”
—Punch
“It is the most original and rewarding novel to appear in the English language for many years.”
—Financial Times
“Carey is one of the great story-tellers of our time, the kind who make you take the telephone off the hook, forget the television and ignore the doorbell… He has the rare gift of making the written world more vivid than life.. A magnificent book.”
—Evening Standard
“I sympathise with General Wolfe, who envied Gray that Elegy; I would rather have written Oscar & Lucinda than taken Quebec or produced this review.”
—Rosemary Stoyle, Literary Review (London)
“Peter Carey has written a less boisterous but more beautiful successor to his prize winning novel Illywhacker…Oscar & Lucinda is an ambitious, joyful, work of fiction.”
—The Age
‘Oscar and Lucinda are two of the most perfectly realised characters in modern fiction. An immensely skilful and absorbing juxtaposition of a gently comic, obliquely ironic, and deeply compassionate vision of human existence.’
—David Williamson
“The glass church is like the novel, a prodigious and enchanting invention, a gamble, a spectacular ‘folly’, a most unlikely tour de force.”
—Hermione Lee, The Observer
“Oscar & Lucinda is a novel of extraordinary richness, complexity and strength – it is a peopled world, humming, buzzing, dancing with life and liveliness; it brings the past, in all its difference, bewilderingly into our present. It fills me with wild, savage envy, and no novelist could say fairer than that.”
—Angela Carter, The Guardian
“It confirms the author (whose earlier Illywhacker earned him a Booker Prize nomination) as a writer blessed with extraordinary imaginative gifts and an outstanding grasp of language. “
—Daily Mail
“As fine a love story and as fascinating an exploration as any reader could wish…Carey writes as if the world he has created, and his own private life, are at stake.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th-century history and the millions of painstaking details.”
—Time
“ A kind of rollercoaster ride… The reader emerges…gasping, blinking, reshaped in a hundred ways, conscious that the world is never going to look the same again.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Carey luxuriates in language…[Oscar & Lucinda is] a brilliant success.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“It is Thomas Wolfe one is reminded of most when reading Peter Carey….they share that magnificent vitality, that ebullient delight in character, detail and language that turns a novel into an important book.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“[Oscar & Lucinda] is very, very hard to put down. There are many pleasures to be had here, chief among them the author’s gift for telling fascinating, entertaining stories…Like the characters of Charles Dickens and Honore de Balzac, Mr. Carey’s creations are real in the simplest human sense.”
—Washington Times
“The well of talent from which Peter Carey draws his tales produces work as sweet and refreshing as a mineral spring…Carey nears the summit occupied by Borges and Pynchon and a very few others.”
—Harlan Ellison
“To say he’s Australia’s Dickens is to classify him, like fossil. He’s Australia’s Peter Carey, and ours.”
—Victoria Glendinning, The Times (London)
‘The most audacious and rewarding of all Carey’s novels.’
—Geoffrey Dutton