Oscar and Lucinda

Summary

A nervous, gambling-addicted Anglican clergyman and a young heiress who owns a Sydney glassworks meet on a ship bound for nineteenth-century Australia and conceive an outlandish wager involving a glass church. Carey writes in a richly textured, slightly antic prose that draws on Dickensian comedy and colonial-era anxiety in equal measure. The novel reimagines the Australian frontier as a place where faith, chance and obsession collide.