The Tax Inspector

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

'Peter Carey is to Sydney what Joyce was to Dublin . . . an absolute master of language and of storytelling.' Thomas Keneally

'A Hieronymus Bosch painting of a book – dense, demonic, at once surreal and hyper-real . . . Let it bowl you over.' Philadelphia Inquirer

'Explosive and enigmatic . . . stunning. Carey makes of his tale an eerie tragicomedy, a novel of manners that edges, inexorably, into a chilling parable out of Edgar Allan Poe.' Newsday