Author(s): Peter Carey

General

When the young French aristocrat Olivier is sent to the New World, apparently to study its prisons but in reality to avoid another revolution, Parrot is sent with him. The son of an English printer, Parrot wanted to be an artist but has ended up as a servant. They make an unlikely pair - but as their adventures with love and money, goal and painting show them, there's nowhere better for unlikely things to flourish than in the glorious, brand-new democratic experiment, America. Carey's most acclaimed novel since True History of the Kelly Gang, Parrot and Olivier in America is a virtuoso portrait of the Old World colliding chaotically with the New. Above all, it is the wildly funny and tender story of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbably work of art.