The Tax Inspector

‘You’re the real thing,’ he said. ‘I knew that when I saw you.’ A dribble of bright blood ran from his hairline down on to his nose. He nodded his head with emphasis. Then slowly, like a boy clowning at a swimming pool, he began to tilt forward. His eyes rolled backwards in his head. He held out the child towards her.

‘Take,’ he said.

As Benny Catchprice fell, the child was passed between them – Maria slid her arms in under the slippery little body and brought it to her, pressing it against her, shuddering. Benny hit the floor. He made a noise like timber falling in a stack. Maria put her hand behind the damp warm head. She could feel lips sucking at her neck. She brought her arms, her bones, her skin, between her baby and her victim.

It was then, as Benny lay amid the planks and bricks with his bare arm half submerged in puddled seepage, she saw his tattooed back for the first time. At first she thought it was a serpent – red, blue, green, scales, something creepy living in a broken bottle or underneath a rock. Then she saw it was not a serpent but an angel, or half an angel – a single wing tattooed on his smooth, boy’s skin – it was long and delicate and it ran from his shoulder to his buttock – an angel wing. It was red, blue, green, luminous, trembling, like a dragon fly, like something smashed against the windscreen of a speeding car.

She took her little boy, warm, squirming, still slippery as a fish, and unfastened her bra, and tucked him in against her skin.

Peter Carey is the author of eleven novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.

www.petercareybooks.com

BOOKS BY PETER CAREY

PARROT AND OLIVER IN AMERICA

HIS ILLEGAL SELF

THEFT

WRONG ABOUT JAPAN

MY LIFE AS A FAKE

30 DAYS IN SYDNEY: A WILDLY DISTORTED ACCOUNT

TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG

JACK MAGGS

THE UNUSUAL LIFE OF TRISTAN SMITH

THE BIG BAZOOHLEY

THE TAX INSPECTOR

OSCAR AND LUCINDA

BLISS

ILLYWHACKER

THE FAT MAN IN HISTORY

ALSO BY

P

ETER

C

AREY

BLISS

For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life. Part The Wizard of Oz, part Dante’s Inferno, and part Australian Book of the Dead, Bliss is a triumph of uninhibited storytelling from a writer of extravagant gifts.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76719-0

HIS ILLEGAL SELF

Seven-year-old Che Selkirk was raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. The son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties, Che has grown up with the hope that one day his parents will come back for him. So when a woman arrives at his front door and whisks him away to the jungles of Queensland, he is confronted with the most important questions of his life: Who is his real mother? Did he know his real father? And if all he suspects is true, what should he do? In this artful tale of a young boy’s journey, His Illegal Self lifts your spirit in the most unexpected way.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27649-0

ILLYWHACKER

In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey’s uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76790-9

JACK MAGGS

The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation. Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as these schemes converge, Maggs rises to the center, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76037-5

MY LIFE AS A FAKE

Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious piece of literature Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose genius? As Sarah tries to secure the manuscript, Chubb draws her into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping, and exile—a story that couldn’t be true unless its teller were mad. My Life as a Fake is Carey at his most audacious and entertaining.

Fiction/978-1-4000-3088-0

OSCAR AND LUCINDA

This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions from the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across