Hailed as a "literary sensation" by The New York Times Book Review, Carpentaria is the luminous award-winning novel by Australian Aboriginal writer and activist Alexis Wright.
"Wild and filled with strange beauty and hardship, Carpenteria celebrates the mythic and the pedestrian of Aboriginal life in Australia's heart. Inventive and epic, the novel reveals complex connections between land and human, public and private life, class and destiny, faith and modernism. Alexis Wright weaves a magical tale with characters that will live on long after the last page is turned." —Walter Mosley (The Long Fall)
"Without doubt an important book." —London Review of Books
"This 2007 Miles Franklin Award–winning novel is the latest masterpiece from Wright, an indigenous Australian author and land rights activist. In the town of Desperance, in northern Queensland, Australia, the question of land ownership is complicated, and every family stakes a claim. There's Normal Phantom's family, Mozzie Fishman's gang, and the white settlers who control the region, but can't quite figure out how to get the native Pricklebush people to assimilate to the white man's ways. The drama unfolds with all the poetry and eclecticism of a Bob Dylan song.... Rarely does an author have such control of her words and her story: Wright's prose soars between the mythical and the colloquial." —Publishers Weekly (starred)
