A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey
Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive.
With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed school teacher. His job is to call out the turns, the grids, the creek crossings on a map that will finally remove them, without warning, from the lily white Australia they all know so well.
A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey’s late style masterpiece; a thrilling high speed story that starts in one way, then takes you to another place altogether. Set in the 1950s in the embers of the British Empire, painting a picture of Queen and subject, black, white and those in-between, this brilliantly vivid novel illustrates how the possession of an ancient culture spirals through history – and the love made and hurt caused along the way.
