Publisher, Blackstone Audio (April 2010)

NOTE: Blackstone Audio VALUE / RETAIL EDITIONS are packaged in attractive, compact cardboard boxes, jewel cases, shrink-wrapped, or DVD cases with full-color art.

Listen to a FREE audio clip.

On Oprah’s Summer Reading List for 2010

An AudioFile Editor's Pick for Most Intriguing Upcoming Releases

“Parrot and Olivier in America grabs its subject and marches down Main Street playing full out, provoking a reader’s delighted applause….Sentence for sentence, Carey’s writing remains matchlessly robust.” —New York Times

“I finished it with unabated enjoyment….The language is vivid, forceful and poetic. There are terrific set pieces…moments Dickensian in their vividness….It's a dazzling, entertaining novel.” —Ursula Le Guin, the Guardian, UK

“The eminently talented Carey has the gift of engaging ventriloquism, and having already channeled the voices of Dickens’s Jack Maggs and the Australian folk hero/master thief Ned Kelly, he now inhabits Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur, a fictionalized version of Alexis de Tocqueville….Richly atmospheric, this wonderful novel is picaresque and Dickensian, with humor and insight injected into an accurately rendered period of French and American history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Parrot and Olivier in America is such a literary work, even fuller than its predecessors of allusion, contrast and comic contradiction, that there is always more to find: the more you bring to it, the more rewarding its insinuations, its unpredictable switches between satire, serious reflection, and plain fun. Like Oscar and Lucinda (not to mention Carey’s other works), it demands and repays repeated reading.” —Times Literary Supplement

Featuring well-developed and multifaceted characters, this book is rife with humorous details and turns of phrase, and the language is sophisticated. Written by a two-time Booker Prize winner, this engaging book will be particularly appreciated by readers interested in early 19th-century American history, the French aristocracy, and emerging democracy.” —Library Journal

“Carey's wonderfully witty and visual prose…springs surprise after surprise on the reader…his version of 1830s America allows him to comment on its modern counterpart: he touches lightly on, among many other things, sub-prime mortgages, an inflated art market and demagogic politicians.” —The Independent (UK)

“Parrot and Olivier has all the quirky qualities that we have come to expect from Peter Carey: a winding narrative, a mass of vivid historical detail, and some very lively writing….The leading characters are beautifully drawn….[A] gripping portrait of Jacksonian America in all its wild variety, from its model farms to its grungy boarding-houses, from its Fourth of July parades to its filthy streets full of copulating pigs.” —The Economist

Olivier (a fictional variation of Alexis de Tocqueville) is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be joined by an enigmatic one-armed marquis. When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States—ostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution—Parrot will be there, too, as spy for the marquis and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier. As the narrative shifts between Parrot and Olivier—their adventures in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands—a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story, Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness.

About the Author: PETER CAREY is the author of ten previous novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.