True History of the Kelly Gang

8vo. Pp. [x], 351, [5]. Pictorial wraps. B/w map, acknowledgments page.

Signed and dated by the Author to title page, in the month of publication.

Author's seventh novel. Winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the 2001 Booker Prize. "Such is life," (Ned Kelly's famous last words). A fictional re-imagining, in epistolary form, of the short, brutish life of Australia's famous outlaw, hanged by the Colonial Authorities in 1880, and inspired by the Jerilderie Letter.

Since his death, Ned Kelly has entered Australian folklore, the language, and continues to be the subject of a large number of books and several movies, including the world's first feature-length film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906). The distinctive homemade armour he wore for his final, ill-fated stand against the Victorian Police Force was the subject of an emblematic series of paintings by Sidney Nolan.

"Carey's second Booker winner is an irresistible tour de force of literary ventriloquism: the supposed autobiography of 19th-century Australian outlaw and 'wild colonial boy' Ned Kelly, inspired by a fragment of Kelly's own prose and written as a glorious rush of semi-punctuated vernacular storytelling. Mythic and tender by turns, these are tall tales from a lost frontier." –The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, The Guardian