Peter Carey’s rich and endlessly inventive tale about two unusual characters in 19th-century Australia won the Booker Prize in 1988.

Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-19th-century Australia.

Winner
The Booker Prize 1988
Published by
Faber & Faber
Publication date

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Peter Carey

Peter Carey

About the Author

Peter Carey is an Australian author who has won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang.
More about Peter Carey

Other nominated books by Peter Carey

Parrot and Olivier in America
Theft: A Love Story
True History of the Kelly Gang
Prize winner
Illywhacker