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   Summary and Book Reviews

Theft: Summary and book reviews of Theft by Peter Carey, plus links to an excerpt from Theft and a biography of Peter Carey.

Theft

Theft
A Love Story
by Peter Carey
Hardcover: May 2006,
272 pages.
Paperback: May 2007,
288 pages.

Publication information
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Reader Reviews

Author Biography
Author Interview
Books by this Author
Critics' Opinion:   very good
Readers' Rating:  Five Stars
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BOOK SUMMARY

From the two-time Booker Prize–winning author and recipient of the Commonwealth Prize comes this new novel about obsession, deception, and redemption, at once an engrossing psychological suspense story and a work of highly charged, fiendishly funny literary fiction.

Michael—a.k.a. "Butcher"—Boone is an ex–"really famous" painter: opinionated, furious, brilliant, and now reduced to living in the remote country house of his biggest collector and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh, a damaged man of imposing physicality and childlike emotional volatility. Alone together they’ve forged a delicate and shifting equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives on three-inch Manolo Blahnik heels. Beautiful, smart, and ambitious, she’s also the daughter-in-law of the late great painter Jacques Liebovitz, one of Butcher’s earliest influences. She’s sweet to Hugh and falls in love with Butcher, and they reciprocate in kind. And she sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making—or the ruin—of them all.

Told through the alternating points of view of the brothers—Butcher’s urbane, intelligent, caustic observations contrasting with Hugh’s bizarre, frequently poetic, utterly unique voice—Theft reminds us once again of Peter Carey’s remarkable gift for creating indelible, fascinating characters and a narrative as gripping as it is deliriously surprising.

BOOK REVIEWS

Very Good BookBrowse
Despite having lived in New York for 15 years, Carey once again sets his latest book, at least in part, in Australia, but we're also taken on a wild ride through Japan and New York in a novel that has received exceptional reviews from all prepublication review sources (including three starred reviews), and has been variously described as "a masterpiece", "a certifiable hoot", "edgy, irreverent, often hilariously profane", "sharply observed, well written, and acerbically witty".  
Full Review Members Only (383 words).

Media Reviews

Very Good  Library Journal
Sharply observed, well written, and acerbically witty, this book will only further Carey's reputation.

Very Good  Publishers Weekly
Starred review. A magnificent high-stakes art heist wrapped around a fraternal saga.

Very Good  Booklist - Donna Seaman
Starred review. Carey is at his satirical best ... and at his most tender.

Very Good  Kirkus Reviews
It's a certifiable hoot. Is the endlessly inventive Carey on the Nobel shortlist? He ought to be.

Very Good  Washington Post
Carey frames a story that shifts before our eyes -- maddeningly complex, hypnotically brilliant, entirely original.

Recent Reader Reviews

Rated 5 of 5 of 5 by Travis Ann Sherman
Book of the Decade
Theft is everything I yearn for in a book. It is beautifully, lyrically written in first person and more amazingly for serious fiction, not serious -- not even a little depressing. Open the covers and you fall immediately into the bizarre modern...   Read More

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