Critical Praise

"Peter Carey is a wily seducer, a mental acrobat who can bound across continents and centuries and make us believe in whatever world he has discovered and imagined. Parrot and Olivier transports us to the rough-and-tumble America of 1830, and it’s possibly the most charming and engaging novel this demon of a story-teller has yet written. His prose has never been more buoyant, more vigorous, more musical. Open this book and listen to Peter Carey sing."

—Paul Auster

"Peter Carey’s latest imaginative and commanding tale [is] a thrillingly fresh and incisive drama of extraordinary personalities set during a time of world-altering vision and action…His transfixing novels are at once sharply funny and profoundly resonant… Brilliant."

—Booklist, (starred review)

"I have been reading with astonishment and envy Parrot and Olivier in America... Carey is a writer I prize not only for his remarkable Dickensian plots but also for the brilliance of his style... He is the most exuberant stylist at work in English today."

—Edmund White, Daily Telegraph (UK)

"One of those comic masterpieces that seems effortless while making you realize that Carey writes some of the best sentences in English."

—Tom Sleigh, New Yorker.com