"Catherine Gehrig, conservator at a London museum, learns of the unexpected death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. Only the museum’s director knew of the affair, and sends Catherine to work on a special project away from prying eyes. An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, a secret love story, and the fate of the world are all brought to life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.
Twice winner of the Booker Prize, Peter Carey's most recent novel Parrot and Olivier in America was described by the Sunday Times as 'an exhilarating tour-de-force'"
"Olivier is a French aristocrat, the traumatised child of survivors of the Revolution. Parrot is the son of an itinerant printer who always wanted to be an artist but ended up a servant. Born on different sides of history, their lives are brought together by their travels in America. When Olivier sets sail for the New World, Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil."
"Michael 'Butcher' Boone is an ex - 'really famous' painter now reduced to living in the remote country house of his biggest collector and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh, a damaged man of imposing physicality and childlike emotions. 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. Beautiful, smart, and ambitious, she's also the daughter-in-law of the late great painter Jacques Liebovitz, one of Butcher's earliest influences. She's sweet to Hugh and falls in love with Butcher, and they reciprocate in kind. And she sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making - or the ruin - of them all."
"Che is raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, the precocious son of radical Harvard students in the sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long-haired teenage neighbour who predicts 'They will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here.' Soon Che too is an outlaw, fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, as he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippy commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely, confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems..."
