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"Jack Maggs is a dazzling tale of obsession, and Jack Maggs stands as a remarkable character, a resurrected antipodean lag returned to England for vengeance and reconciliation."
--Thomas Keneally
In the Booker Prize-winning author, a vivid and robust novel of Dickensian London--a place and a tale teeming with mystery, science, and passion.
The time, the 1830s. Jack Maggs, a foundling been trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported to Australia, has reversed his fortunes--and seeks to fulfill his well-concealed, innermost desire. Returning "home" under threat of execution, he inveigles his way into a household in Great Queen Street, where he's quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements--and where he falls under the hypnotic scrutiny of Tobias Oates, a celebrated young writer fascinated by the procedure of mesmerism and enthusiastic about the criminal mind.
From this volatile milieu emerges a small number of vividly drawn characters in the dangerous pursuit of love, whether romantic or familial--each of them with secrets, and secret longings, that may spell certain ruin. And since their various schemes converge, the captivating figure at the center is Jack Maggs himself, at once frightening, mystifying, and utterly compelling.
"Imaginative and audacious . . . A twentieth-century, post-colonial Dickens novel . . . This strange, bold, gripping, and wonderful novel is the storyplot of a power struggle, a double love story, a quest story, and a tale of trickery and disguise. It's about taking possession--of an inheritance, of someone else's soul, of your own destiny--and being taken possession of. Not least, it's the story of one writer's being possessed by another."
--Hermione Lee, The Observer
"Uncommonly exciting and engaging. Just as much as anyone now writing, Peter Carey is a master of storytelling. His empathy along with his characters, coupled with his psychological sharp-sightedness, has them almost jumping off of the page in full human complexity. An especial bonus is his style . . . Vivid, exact, unexpected images and language match the quick, witty intelligence flickering through this novel, and make it a triumph of ebullient indictment, humane insight, and creative generosity."
--Peter Kemp, Sunday Times (London)
"Writing and philosophical contemplations of the highest order . . . On the par with, and even more interesting than, his two earlier masterpieces . . . An absorbing, beautifully written novel finished off with a most satisfactory happy ending, and with incidents, an atmosphere, and ideas that linger in the mind."
--Carmen Callil, The Daily Telegraph
