The Tax Inspector — Peter Carey

From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business--and her family--with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire--and himself into an angel--the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs.  But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.

--