An Unstable Element

A glorious, picaresque memoir from the legendary double Booker-winner

Here are the facts of a writer’s life, as he claims them to be.

A childhood spent above the spare-parts department of his parents’ car dealership in Bacchus Marsh, Australia (population at the time: 2,825, he says.) A stint as a boarder at the gothic Geelong Grammar; the story is he arrived just after Rupert Murdoch and a little before King Charles. A doomed obsession with chemistry. The hippie years in Queensland rainforest. An antic career in advertising. He was still attached to one of the world’s great tinned-tuna accounts when writing his first Booker winner.

An Unstable Element is the account of a most unconventional literary education and life. In these pages, we experience the creation of visionary fictions, their reception, and the reality of a master's confidence and doubt, the burning desire to make something beautiful that had never existed before. Being the work of Peter Carey, it is electrically made: layered, gleeful, open, alive, and vibrating with the themes that have defined his work: outsiders, rebels, empire; Australia, England, America; history, memory and love. It is a living, breathing example, too, of the exuberant, heart-lifting invention that define his genius.