Parrot And Olivier In America

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 2010
Edition: First Edition

Description: 451 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout.

Publishers Description: From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author: an irrepressible, audacious, trenchantly funny new novel set in the 19th century and inspired in part by the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.With dazzling exuberance and all the richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer, Peter Carey explores the birth of democracy, the limits of friendship and whether people really can remake themselves in a New World.The two men at the heart of the novel couldnt be any more different: Olivier is the son of French aristocrats who (barely) survived the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerate English printer. But when young Parrot is separated from his father (after a stupendous conflagration at a house of forgery) he runs into the powerful embrace of a one-armed marquis who will be his conduit - like it or not - into a life as closely (mis)allied with Oliviers as if they were connected by blood. And when Olivier sets sail for America - ostensibly to make a study of the American penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from the latest guillotineurs - Parrot, unable to loosen the Marquiss grip, is there too: as spy, scribe, comptroller, protector, foe and foil.As the narrative unfurls, shifting between the perspectives of Olivier and Parrot, between their picaresque adventures apart and together, in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands - a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold.

ISBN: 9780571275229