Parrot and Olivier in America »

One of our most acclaimed authors, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey s novels temper feats of imagination and language with a solid grounding in history and literature. Through his novels, many of which re-imagine the peopling and history of his native Australia, Carey has garnered renown as a novelist who can write about important subjects in a voice both readable and distinctly challenging.

Parrot and Olivier in America has been shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

From the two-time Booker Prize–winning author comes an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early nineteenth-century America.

Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.

When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States—ostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution—Parrot will be there, too: as spy for the marquis, and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier.

As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, between their picaresque adventures apart and together—in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands—a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story, Peter Carey explores the experiment of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness and with all the richness and surprise of characterization, imagery, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Peter Carey's eleventh novel, an "improvisation" on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, offers no serious revelations about that nineteenth-century French aristocrat's views on democracy in America, and for that we should be grateful. What a crashing bore that would be. Instead of a novel of ideas, Parrot and Olivier in America is a big, trippy, often strangely beautiful novel of observations, with proper focus on the interplay between the two self-absorbed personalities doing the observing.