One of the classics of Australian literature, Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin award-winning novel is being rereleased in a new edition designed by Jenny Grigg.Accompanies the April release of Praiseworthy, Wright’s first work of fiction since 2014.Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf country of north-western Queensland. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob 2007 on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce.Carpentaria was the 2007 winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, ALS Gold Medal, Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. It has been published in the US, UK, France, Italy and China.‘a swelling, heaving tsunami of a novel: stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humour, sweetened by spiralling lyricism and swaggering with the confident promise of a tale dominated by risk, roguery and revelation.’ — The Australian‘Wright breaks all the rules of grammar and syntax to sweep us along on a great torrent of language that thrills and amazes with its inventiveness and humour and with the sheer power of its storytelling. It’s brutal and confronting and it’s sad and funny at the same time.’ — Sydney Morning Herald
