AUDIOBOOK
About
Olivier, an improvisation on the life 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.
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Reviews
"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
"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
"Gorgeously entertaining and moving…This is a novel of fierce attachments, charting the proximity of beauty and terror in the human soul."
O, the Oprah Magazine