Parrot and Olivier in America — Peter Carey

Two-time Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey's latest feat of imagination is an irrepressible, audacious, and trenchantly funny novel set mostly in nineteenth-century America.

Olivier -- an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville -- is an aristocrat born just after the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver. Their lives are joined when Olivier sets sail for the New World to save his neck from one more revolution and Parrot is sent with him as spy, protector, foe, and foil. With the story of their unlikely friendship, Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy with the dazzling inventiveness and richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.