Parrot and Olivier in America
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
Parrot and Olivier in America has been shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author comes an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early nineteenth-century America.
Read more
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. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected 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 the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, between their picaresque adventures apart and together—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 experiment of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness and with all the richness and surprise of characterization, imagery, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.
Liked Parrot and Olivier in America? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Parrot and Olivier in America. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
C Shares fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction -
The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson Shares historical fiction, fiction, literary fiction -
The Stars in the Bright Sky Shares fiction, man booker, booker -
Show Me A Mountain Shares historical fiction, fiction, literary fiction
