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Parrot and Olivier in America
Peter Carey
Knopf
May 2010
On Sale: April 20, 2010
400 pages
ISBN: 0307592626
EAN: 9780307592620
Hardcover
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Fiction
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.
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