True History of the Kelly Gang

Peter Carey tells the story of Australia's most famous outlaw, Ned Kelly, who was executed as a murderer and a horse thief in 1880. The facts of Kelly's brief life are revealed in a series of letters, very much in his own quirky vernacular voice, that he writes to the baby daughter he never sees. What is clear from Peter Carey's account is that poverty, hardship, and the prejudice of the English police force toward the Irish are all part of the plight of Ned Kelly--a good boy gone wrong who became a national hero. THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG was a New York Times "Editor's Choice" for 2001.

"Carey succeeds brilliantly in allowing Kelly to tell most of the story himself, in his own words as a first-person narrator....Carey has found the ways and means to tell the story, faithful to the facts, yet adding dimension and complexity to it. Some elements have been simplified, but not much has been changed....But the great strength and pleasure of this novel is the language Carey has created for Ned Kelly, allowing a full range from lyrical to rowdy and ribald." - Frederick Lewis Allen (Washington Post Book World, 1/17/01)

"Carey's novel is...a corrective to the popular conception--even among some Australians--of Kelly as a thug, thief and murderer. The Ned Kelly of this account is nothing less than a folk hero and freedom fighter, a defiant exemplar of Irish-Australian cussedness in the face of colonial oppression....Packed with incident, alive with comedy and pathos, TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG contains pretty much everything you could ask of a novel." - Herbert L. Baer (New York Times Book Review, 1/7/01)

"Facing more than 300 pages of 'Kellyspeak,' a Careyan derivative of the language Ned used..., may daunt readers until they develop a fascination for so original a verbal continuo....couched in Ned's voice, events unfold with slow-motion inevitability...." - Fred E. Coy (Times Literary Supplement, 2/5/01)

"In a spectacular feat of literary ventriloquism, the Australian-born novelist Peter Carey invites the outlaw Ned Kelly to tell his story. He summons the rollicking, unschooled, hugely colorful voice of Australia's best-known underdog for a bravura book-length performance. Writing...convincingly in Ned's argot..., [Carey] invests Ned's account with all the makings of a swaggering adventure tale as well as a classic Western tragedy....[A] seamlessly imagined coming-of-age story set in wild country and wilder times. Though Ned Kelly died in 1880..., he could not be more furiously alive." - Morris H. Kramer (New York Times, 1/4/01)

"Peter Carey is a great-hearted writer, with an eye and an appetite for the vagaries and eccentricities of human beings as they struggle to make their way through the world's difficulties....The tone never falters, and this is a considerable achievement given the breadth of the book, yet there are passages when the relentless, unpunctuated periods of the prose grind with awful monotony in the reader's ear....[Carey's] Ned Kelly is no saint..., but he is a tragic figure, driven by love and outrage and the desire for justice. Even if Australian critics are ashamed of Ned Kelly, they can take not - O'kelly Isley (New York Review of Books, 3/29/01)

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