Wildly inventive, funny and profoundly moving, A Long Way from Home opens in 1953 with the arrival of the handsome Titch Bobs, his beautiful wife Irene and their two children in the small town of Bacchus Marsh. Titch is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Irene loves her husband, and loves to drive fast. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal endurance race around the ancient continent, over roads no car is designed to survive. With them is their neighbour and navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed school teacher who calls the turns and creek crossings on a map that will lead them, without warning, away from the white Australia they all know so well.

Peter Carey's new masterpiece, begins in one way and takes you somewhere you never thought you'd be. Often funny, the book is a page-turner, surprising you with history these characters never even knew themselves. Its profound reckoning with Australia's brutal treatment of the continent's aboriginal people also resonates strongly with readers. (From Random House)

A Long Way Home is available in February 2018.