Carpentaria
On sale
22nd July 2016
Price: £12.99
Set in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance, Carpentaria is the unforgettable portrait of the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other.
By turns operatic and surreal, Wright’s stunning and richly imagined storytelling is a blend of myth and scripture, farce and politics. Her extraordinary characters – Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the rubbish-dump and the fish-embalming king of time, Angel Day and Normal Phantom – stride like giants in this storm-swept world.
By turns operatic and surreal, Wright’s stunning and richly imagined storytelling is a blend of myth and scripture, farce and politics. Her extraordinary characters – Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the rubbish-dump and the fish-embalming king of time, Angel Day and Normal Phantom – stride like giants in this storm-swept world.
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Reviews
Alexis Wright's Carpentaria is already considered an Australian masterwork, one of those books which re-make a world, in this case the world of tropic Australia, Aboriginal and European, anew. It will attract and excite readers the world over.
This is the kind of writing in which a reader can put their entire trust in the narrator, put the weight of their doubt in the narrator's hands. It is like being spoken to by someone with a voice you can trust, someone standing close by. It is as if you could hear their intake of breath, the compassion in their voice, their amusement at the foolishness of mortals.
One of the most enchanting books of this year
[A] thundering, swelling epic ... Wright has a way of entering the hearts, minds and bloodstreams of her characters.
An astonishing tour de force ... undeniably important
So comprehensive is Wright's vision that reading it is like looking at her world from the inside. It's an unashamedly big book - big in scope, ambition and physical size - and well-suited to the Gulf country it sings. It is also an important book.
Carpentaria is a swelling, heaving, tsunami of a novel: stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humour, sweetened by spiralling lyricism and swaggering with the confident promise of a tale dominated by risk, roguery and revelation.
A huge, audacious, monstrous work of genius...moving, uplifting and funny...you'll emerge from this astonishing novel with a bit of your brain left in the Dreamtime.
Wright's gift to Australian literature is Desperance ... it's her uncanny ear for the particularities of local language and eye for striking symbolism that could carry Carpentaria into the classics sections of bookshelves in years to come.
Wright's is the authentic aboriginal voice. With humour and occasional farce, but always with an underlying truthfulness, she delivers a brutal portrait of the physical and psychological violence between the white newcomers and the original inhabitants.
A truly breathtaking Australian epic ... a sure-fire beachbuster