MY LIFE AS A FAKE is a fantastical gothic tale, in part inspired by Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, about a hoax poet who mysteriously materialises and then pursues, taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker. Two-time Booker prize winning author Peter Carey uses the Ern Malley hoax as a springboard, but the leap he takes is into the realms of richly imagined fiction. Sara, an English poetry editor on holiday in Kuala Lumpur, stumbles upon an Australian, Christopher Chubb, reading Rilke in a bicycle shop. The man shows her a scrap of poetry the like of which shes never seen. She becomes determined to get her hands on the poetry, to publish in (and revive) her ailing poetry journal. Chubb insists that Sara hear his story first. His tale is told over many sittings, and is the central story of MY LIFE AS A FAKE. As a conservative young poet in Melbourne in the 1950s, Chubb decided to teach the country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submitted for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubbs imagination. Not only did the magazine fall for the hoax, but its editor was prosecuted for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone uncannily resembling the man in the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle leapt to his feet. At that moment the horrified Chubb was confronted by the malevolent being he had himself manufactured. Peter Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how the phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to the seedy, sweaty, tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur. An unforgettable follow-up to the spectacularly successful TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, MY LIFE AS A FAKE has all the Carey trademarks and more: an irresistible narrator, a tragi-comic anti-hero, a world that is so familiar yet utterly strange and disorienting, and a story that keeps you reading way past your bedtime. MY LIFE AS A FAKE is a manic, endearing and penetrating ode to fakery at its most truthful and truth at its most fake, a novel that penetrates to the heart of the alchemy of literature itself.

Born into an aristocratic French family just after the revolution, Olivier is an endangered species in his homeland. Parrot, too, is out of place: the son of an itinerant English printer, he wanted to be an artist but after many twists of fate, in middle age has ended up a servant. Starting on different sides of history, their lives will be permanently joined by an enigmatic, one-armed marquis. When the young Olivier sets sail for the New World - ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to avoid yet another revolution - Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. Throughout their adventures with love and money, incarceration and democracy, painting and writing, they make an unlikely pair. But where better for unlikely things to flourish than in the glorious, brand-new democratic experiment, America?

Olivier is a young aristocrat, one of an endangered species born in France just after the Revolution. Parrot, the son of an itinerant English printer, wanted to be an artist but has ended up in middle age as a servant.When Olivier sets sail for the New World - ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to avoid yet another revolution - Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. Through their adventures with women and money, incarceration and democracy, writing and painting, they make an unlikely pair. But where better for unlikely things to flourish than in the glorious, brand-new experiment, America?A dazzlingly inventive reimagining of Alexis de Tocqueville's famous journey, Parrot and Olivier in America brilliantly evokes the Old World colliding with the New. Above all, it is a wildly funny, tender portrait of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbable work of art.

Carey explores the life and times of Australia's most enduring folk legend, Ned Kelly and his gang. Carey, using Ned Kelly himself as the powerful narrator of this novel, written for a daughter he will never seen, gives us an emotional life we could never imagine. A novel of the class-ridden society of colonial Victoria in the 1870s.