"The stuff of shimmering transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th-century history and the millions of painstaking details."
--Time

"A kind of rollercoaster ride . . . .The reader emerges . . . gasping, blinking, reshaped in a hundred ways, conscious that the world is never going to look the same again."
--The Washington Post Book World

Carey luxuriates in language . . . . [Oscar & Lucinda is] a brilliant success."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"It is Thomas Wolfe one is reminded of most when reading Peter Carey . . . they share that magnificent vitality, that ebullient delight in character, detail and language that turns a novel into an important book."
--The New York Times Book Review

"[Oscar & Lucinda] is very, very hard to put down. There are many pleasures to be had here, chief among them the author's gift for telling fascinating, entertaining stories . . . . Like the characters of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, Mr. Carey's creations are real in the simplest human sense."
--Washington Times

"A commanding writer with laser eye for detail and luxuriant narrative gifts."
--Wall Street Journal

"Peter Carey is to Sydney what Joyce was to Dublin . . . an absolute master of language and storytelling."
--Thomas Keneally

"Carey can write. He is funny, humane, and profound."
--The Literary Review (London)

"The well of talent from which Peter Carey draws his tales produces work as sweet and refreshing as a mineral spring . . . . Carey nears the summit occupied by Borges and Pynchon and a very few others."
--Harlan Ellison

"[Carey] works a literary territory all his own, combining elements of absurdism, black humor, social satire and old-fashioned family saga . . . a pleasure."
--Miami Herald