Over the course of his stellar writing life, Peter Carey has explored his homeland of Australia in such highly acclaimed novels as Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang and Amnesia. Writing at the peak of his powers, Carey takes us on an unforgettable journey that maps his homeland's secrets in this extraordinary new novel. Wildly inventive, funny and profoundly moving, A Long Way from Home opens in 1953 with the arrival of the tiny, handsome Titch Bobs, his beautiful doll of a 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. Just like the novel, Peter Carey's new masterpiece, begins in one way and takes you somewhere you never thought you'd be. Often funny, the book is also and always 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 will also resonate strongly with Canadian readers.

NUBClub was split on this novel about a time-trial race through Australia that destroys the myths of the two protagonists. About half of us enjoyed the journey of discovery that Willy and Irene went through, particularly the way that racism was depicted and Willy's first unconscious and then deliberate attempts to tell the stories of the aboriginal people. We also liked following Irene on her disillusionment with her husband Titch and how she too faces her internal racism. The other half of NUBClub was not as impressed. They found the end of the book confusing, and we all agreed that Willy's time on the "plantation" was a bit unclear. None of us were satisfied with Irene's ending -- we felt the author just didn't resolve her story -- but that pointed to the overall direction that Carey took in the novel, half-explaining things and leaving a lot unsaid. A lot of the difference in opinion on this book hooked on that point, but the problems with the ending meant none of us considered it a favorite. Overall, there were lots of great points (the horror of the farm, the use of maps to tell different histories, the race as a metaphor for navigating the world, the beautifully pointed racism of Titch denying Willy's history), but the book as a whole left many of us unsatisfied.