Illywhacker

Peter Carey’s contemporary classic is a dazzling comic account of one man’s unbelievable exploits across the Australian continent.  “It is impossible to convey in a review the cumulative brilliance and accelerating hilarity of the prose" (London Review of Books)

In Australian slang, an Illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character — especially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies. 

“Carey can spin a yarn with the best of them…. Illywhacker is a big, garrulous, funny novel…. If you haven’t been to Australia, read Illywhacker. It will give you the feel of it like nothing else I know.”  -  Howard Jacobson, The New York Times Book Review

Peter Carey is an Australian author who has won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. He has also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize twice (for Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang), and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times (for Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs). He was shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for his entire body of work. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.