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A Long Way from Home

Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available
The two-time Booker Prize-winning author now gives us a wildly exuberant, wily new novel that circumnavigates 1954 Australia, revealing as much about the country/continent as it does about three audacious individuals who take part in the infamous 10,000-mile race, the Redex Trial. Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern 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 schoolteacher who calls the turns and creeks crossings on a map that will remove them, without warning, from the white Australia they all know so well. This is a thrilling high-speed story that starts in one way, and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves. Set in the 1950s, this a world every American will recognize: black, white, who we are, how we got here, and what we did to each other along the way. A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey's late-style masterpiece.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 4, 2017
      Carey’s unfortunate latest (after Amnesia) starts out being about a race and ends up being about race, but it’s marred by so many “what’s going on here?” moments and convenient plot-changing contrivances that readers will wonder what story Carey’s trying to tell, and how. In postwar Australia, car salesman Titch Bobs decides to enter the Redex Trial, a grueling endurance car race around Australia, with the goal of winning and using the ensuing celebrity to open his own dealership. His crew: his wife (and driver) Irene, and his neighbor (and navigator), quiz show champion Willie Bachhuber. Carey takes a lot of time setting up his narrative chess pieces, and it’s not long after the race starts (over a third of a way into the novel) that a family tragedy breaks up Titch’s crew and eventually sends one of them on a baffling adventure that unearths a life-changing secret and lays bare the shameful history of indignities perpetrated against Aboriginal people. Carey’s prose is cutting and often quite funny (“On the far shore stood a moustached white man who should have been told, years ago, don’t wear shorts.”), but that alone doesn’t save the overly shaggy story. This won’t go down as one of Carey’s better efforts.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Colin McPhillamy, as Willie Bachhuber, and Saskia Maarleveld, as Irene Bobs, narrate the story of the 1954 Reddix, a 10,000-mile endurance test that circumnavigates the vast Australian continent. McPhillamy gives Willie a believable voice as he slowly comes to the realization that his German ancestry is a lie. Maarleveld, as Irene, begins pertly but becomes more forceful as she faces her own challenges while fighting to be recognized as a competent woman in a man's world. The Reddix, which begins as a publicity stunt and a lark, becomes a tool for opening the eyes of white Australia to the ignored world of the Aboriginal population. Craig Baldwin, as Willie's son, closes the circle as he comes to terms with his father and history. A fascinating journey to awareness. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

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  • English

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