Peter Carey "has built a distinguished career out of offbeat, risk-taking novels," writes Time magazine critic Paul Gray. He has won the prestigious Man Booker Prize twice, for his novel Oscar and Lucinda and for True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictionalized memoir of legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. With inventiveness and humor, Carey’s new novel explores the unlikely friendship between a Frenchman and an Englishman working in early 19th-century America.