Faber announces new Peter Carey novel
A Long Way From Home is the new book the from Man Booker Prize winner
Faber & Faber has acquired Peter Carey’s new novel – a rip-roaring journey towards the meaning of love, family and home.
Mitzi Angel acquired UK & Commonwealth rights from Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Faber will publish in January 2018, Sonny Mehta at Knopf will publish in the US, Anne Collins at Random House in Canada and Ben Ball at Penguin Australia.
A Long Way from Home opens in 1953 with the arrival of the Bobbsey family in Bacchus Marsh, Australia. Their neighbour, Willie Bachhuber, is immediately drawn into their vibrant world, and when Titch and Irene Bobbsey decide to enter the famous Redex Trial – a brutal car race that circumnavigates the continent – Willie is brought on as their navigator. As they drive into unknown territory, and cross the outback, Willie will discover the heartrending truth about his own and his country’s past.
Over the course of forty-five years Carey has explored his homeland Australia in such highly acclaimed, prize-winning novels as Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang and Amnesia. He is one of only three writers who has won the Man Booker Prize twice. He was presented the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in 2015. He has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize twice and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times. He is published in over thirty-seven languages.
Angel said: ‘A Long Way from Home is an exhilarating, disturbing, hilarious, thought-provoking journey around the Australian continent, in the company of some of the most vivid characters I’ve encountered in fiction. Peter Carey’s extraordinary book takes in the sweep of Australian history – in particular its fraught relationship to race. We are very proud to publish what will prove to be a lasting work of literature from one of the world’s great storytellers.’