Vintage
January 2011
On Sale: January 11, 2011
Featuring: Alexis de Tocqueville
400 pages ISBN: 0307476014 EAN: 9780307476012 Paperback Add to Wish List
Man Booker Prize Finalist
National Book Award Finalist
Two-time Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey’s latest feat of
imagination is an irrepressible, audacious, and trenchantly
funny novel set mostly in nineteenth-century America.
Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de
Tocqueville—is an aristocrat born just after the French
Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant
English engraver. Their lives are joined when Olivier sets
sail for the New World to save his neck from one more
revolution and Parrot is sent with him as spy, protector,
foe, and foil. With the story of their unlikely friendship,
Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy
with the dazzling inventiveness and richness of
characterization, story, and language that we have come to
expect from this superlative writer.