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Winner of the 2001 Booker Prize

Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also—at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century—a Great American Novel.

This is Ned Kelly's true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and, ultimately, a cold-blooded murderer; to most other Australians, he was a scapegoat and patriot persecuted by "English" landlords and their agents.

With his brothers and two friends, Kelly eluded a massive police manhunt for twenty months, living by his wits and strong heart, supplementing his bushwhacking skills with ingenious bank robberies while enjoying the support of most everyone not in uniform. He declined to flee overseas when he could, bound to win his jailed mother's freedom by any means possible, including his own surrender. In the end, however, she served out her sentence in the same Melbourne prison where, in 1880, her son was hanged.

Still his country's most powerful legend, Ned Kelly is here chiefly a man in full: devoted son, loving husband, fretful father, and loyal friend, now speaking as if from the grave. With this mythic outlaw and the story of his mighty travails and exploits, and with all the force of a classic Western, Peter Carey has breathed life into a historical figure who transcends all borders and embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom.

"In a spectacular feat of literary ventriloquism, the Australian-born novelist Peter Carey invites the outlaw Ned Kelly to tell his story. He summons the rollicking, unschooled, hugely colorful voice of Australia's best-known underdog for a bravura book-length performance. Writing...convincingly in Ned's argot..., [Carey] invests Ned's account with all the makings of a swaggering adventure tale as well as a classic Western tragedy....[A] seamlessly imagined coming-of-age story set in wild country and wilder times. Though Ned Kelly died in 1880..., he could not be more furiously alive."

Janet Maslin, New York Times, 01/04/2001

"Carey succeeds brilliantly in allowing Kelly to tell most of the story himself, in his own words as a first-person narrator....Carey has found the ways and means to tell the story, faithful to the facts, yet adding dimension and complexity to it. Some elements have been simplified, but not much has been changed....But the great strength and pleasure of this novel is the language Carey has created for Ned Kelly, allowing a full range from lyrical to rowdy and ribald."

George Garrett, Washington Post Book World, 01/17/2001

True History of the Kelly Gang: Search Results