The Tax Inspector
Page 33
OSCAR AND LUCINDA
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions from the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77750-2
THE TAX INSPECTOR
Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbagful of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire—and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Peter Carey, creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73598-4
THEFT
Michael “Butcher” Boone is an ex-“really famous” painter, now reduced to living in a remote country house and acting as a caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh. Alone together, they’ve forged a delicate equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27648-3
TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG
To his pursuers, Ned Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief, and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief, Ned saw his first prison cell at fifteen and by the age of twenty-six had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72467-1
WRONG ABOUT JAPAN
When Peter Carey offered to take his son to Japan, twelve-year-old Charley stipulated no temples or museums. He wanted to see manga, anime, and cool, weird stuff. His father said yes. Out of that bargain comes this enchanting tour of the mansion of Japanese culture, as entered through its garish, brightly lit back door. Funny, surprising, distinguished by its wonderfully nuanced portrait of a father and son thousands of miles from home, Wrong About Japan is a delight.
Travel/978-1-4000-7836-3
ALSO AVAILABLE:
Fat Man in History, 978-0-679-74332-3
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1993
Copyright © 1991 by Peter Carey
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Ltd., London, in 1991. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1991.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from ‘Beds Are Burning’ by Robert Hirst, James Moginie, and Peter Garrett. Copyright © 1987 by Sprint Music Pty. Ltd. All right reserved.
Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carey, Peter.
The tax inspector / Peter Carey.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76429-4
I. Title.
PR9619.3.C36T39 1993
823—dc20 92-56375
Author photograph © Mariana Cook
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