Product Description

New with small crease to bottom corner. A fantastic piece presenting Ned Kelly in the full, crude, delicate, menacing and heart-wrenching flesh. (fic)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53264 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .57 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• New
• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
• Guaranteed packaging
• No quibbles returns

Amazon.co.uk Review
In True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey returns to the harsh, brutal world of Australian history, so brilliantly evoked in earlier novels such as Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda. Set in the desolate settler communities north of Melbourne in the late 19th century, the novel is told in the form of a journal, written by the famous outlaw and "bushranger" Ned Kelly, to a daughter he will never see. As Kelly explains, "I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lies may I burn in hell if I speak false".

The salty, colloquial, unpunctuated style of Kelly's journal is reproduced with great skill, as Carey recounts the outlaw's early life with a cross-dressing, Irish immigrant sheep worker, and a beautiful but headstrong mother, always on the wrong side of the law. Inadvertently causing the arrest and death of his father, Ned realises that "there were a drought and nothing flourishing there but misery I were the oldest son I thought it time to earn my place", a decision that ultimately leads him into conflict with the law, and to form the notorious Kelly Gang.

The novel contains some wonderfully lyrical and deeply moving moments, as Ned struggles to articulate the harsh injustice of the world around him, but some readers might find Carey's epistolary style rather restrictive and colourless after the first 100 pages, and lacking in the imaginative excitement of Carey's earlier novels. --Jerry Brotton

Review
'Peter Carey has produced some very fine novels before now, but this, I would say, is his finest.' --Daily Telegraph

'Contains pretty much everything you could ask of a novel.' --New York Times Book Review

'[Peter Carey is] without question the pre-eminent literary voice of post-colonial Australia, he loves to take risks.' --Guardian

About the Author
Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other honors include the Commonwealth Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for 20 years.