Peter Carey Books in Order

This volume gathers Carey's early stories, where ordinary life suddenly tilts into the bizarre, funny, and cruel. The pieces use surreal premises to probe power, fear, greed, and the strange rules people invent to live by.

Carey's second story collection is darker and sharper, mixing black humor with menace. These stories move through obsession, violence, and social absurdity, showing how quickly everyday life can slip into nightmare.

After dying for nine minutes and coming back, advertising man Harry Joy decides his comfortable life is actually hell. His attempt to escape corruption, family rot, and the fake language of business becomes a savage comic fable.

Herbert Badgery, a self-proclaimed liar who says he is 139 years old, spins his way through much of 20th century Australia. It's a sprawling, unruly story about hustlers, inventions, family myths, and a nation built on salesmanship.

In 19th century England and Australia, shy clergyman Oscar Hopkins and fiercely independent heiress Lucinda Leplastrier bond over a dangerous love of gambling. Their bold wager, moving a glass church into the bush, turns romance into a test of faith, luck, and obsession.

The Catchprice family runs a decaying car business on the edge of Sydney, held together by greed, secrets, and habit. When pregnant tax inspector Maria Takis arrives, she exposes a household already close to collapse.

Born badly deformed in the invented nation of Efica, Tristan Smith grows up backstage, watching performance and politics blur together. His search for his father and for a place in the world becomes a strange, moving satire of power and identity.

This collection brings together Carey's early short fiction from The Fat Man in History and War Crimes, along with additional stories. It's the best place to see his strange premises, dry wit, and gift for turning satire unsettling.

Nine-year-old Sam Kellow gets stranded in a grand Toronto hotel just as his parents are running out of money. When a bizarre children's contest offers a possible jackpot, he stumbles into a funny, offbeat adventure full of chance and trouble.

An ex-convict returns from Australia to London to find the young man he once treated like a son. Instead he falls into the hands of Tobias Oates, an ambitious writer, in this bold, sly reworking of Dickens.

Ned Kelly tells his own story in rough, urgent pages written while he is hunted across colonial Australia. Carey turns the outlaw into a vivid, conflicted voice and asks who gets to write history in the first place.

After years away, Carey returns to Sydney with a tape recorder and a restless eye, collecting stories from friends, strangers, and the city itself. The result is an impressionistic portrait of Sydney at once affectionate, funny, and unsettled.

In Kuala Lumpur, magazine editor Sarah Wode-Douglass meets a disgraced Australian poet who claims his invented genius, Bob McCorkle, became terrifyingly real. Carey turns a literary hoax into a feverish story of fraud, creation, and revenge.

Carey travels through Japan with his manga and anime obsessed son, Charley, trying to understand a culture that keeps slipping past his assumptions. It's a quick, funny, thoughtful book about being wrong, getting closer, and sharing the trip anyway.

Faded painter Michael "Butcher" Boone is hiding out in rural Australia with his volatile brother Hugh when a glamorous stranger appears with a tempting offer. Soon art, money, desire, and forgery are tangled together in a sharp, darkly funny story.

In 1972, seven-year-old Che Selkirk is swept out of hiding by Dial, a young radical who may be able to reunite him with his parents. Their flight from New York to Australia is tender, dangerous, and charged with the politics of the era.

A nervous young French aristocrat and his sharp, skeptical servant sail to early America in a tale loosely inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville. Their journey turns into a funny, pointed look at class, democracy, ambition, and reinvention.

Grieving museum conservator Catherine Gehrig is sent to restore a mysterious mechanical bird. As she unpacks its secrets and the notebooks of the man who commissioned it, grief, obsession, and ingenious clockwork begin to mesh.

Disgraced journalist Felix Moore is hired to write the story of Gaby Baillieux, a brilliant young hacker blamed for a devastating computer virus. As he digs into her life, Carey ties cybercrime to old political wounds and Australia's uneasy history with power.

Irene and Titch Bobs enter the grueling Redex Trial, racing around 1950s Australia with neighbor Willie Bachhuber as navigator. What begins as a road adventure opens into a deeper reckoning with buried histories, identity, and the violence beneath the map.