Recommendations
Books Like Oscar and Lucinda
Gambling, faith, and a glass church through the Australian wilderness
If Oscar and Lucinda swept you up — the glass church, the gamble, the colonial Australian wilderness, Carey's exuberant prose — these eight novels share its magical ambition, its historical range, or its portrait of people whose faith leads them somewhere extraordinary.
- 1Buy
True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey
Ned Kelly narrating his own life in letters to the daughter he will never know — Carey's second Booker Prize winner; the most immediate companion to Oscar and Lucinda in its Australian colonial history, its first-person voice of extraordinary vividness, and its portrait of a society in which violence and beauty are inextricable; recommended directly after Oscar and Lucinda
- 2Buy
Illywhacker
by Peter Carey
Herbert Badgery, a self-proclaimed liar and illywhacker (a professional trickster), telling the story of Australia across 139 years — Carey's second novel and the most directly comparable to Oscar and Lucinda in its magical realism, its sweep of Australian history, and its interest in the relationship between storytelling, deception, and national identity
- 3Buy
The Riders
by Tim Winton
Fred Scully waiting in Ireland for a wife who arrives on a plane alone without his family — Winton's Booker-shortlisted novel shares Oscar and Lucinda's sense of a protagonist driven by a faith that cannot be rationally justified into an extreme and self-destructive commitment; Australia's other great serious novelist, in a novel that matches Carey's intensity in a different register
- 4Buy
Possession
by A.S. Byatt
Two academic researchers discovering a secret love affair between two Victorian poets — Byatt's Booker Prize winner shares Oscar and Lucinda's Victorian period setting, its preoccupation with faith and romance in the nineteenth century, and its elaborate formal structure; where Carey works in magical realism, Byatt works in pastiche, but both novels use the Victorian period as a lens for examining what people believe and what belief costs
- 5Buy
The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Quoyle, a failed journalist, moving to Newfoundland with his daughters and slowly finding a life — Proulx's Pulitzer Prize winner shares Oscar and Lucinda's interest in an improbable man finding an unlikely redemption in an extreme landscape; where Carey's landscape is the Australian Outback, Proulx's is the Newfoundland coast, and both landscapes are characters as much as settings
- 6Buy
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil arriving in Soviet Moscow with his retinue — Bulgakov's magical realist satire shares Oscar and Lucinda's delight in the fantastic and its use of an improbable impossible event (a black magic show, a glass church) to expose the pretensions and hypocrisies of its surrounding society; for readers who want magical realism applied to organized religion and political authority
- 7Buy
Cloudstreet
by Tim Winton
Two working-class families sharing a large house in Perth from the 1940s to the 1960s — Winton's most celebrated novel is the Australian domestic counterpart to Oscar and Lucinda's Australian colonial adventure: the same magical realism, the same delight in the English language pushed to its limits, and the same portrait of ordinary people in an extraordinary country
- 8Buy
The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
A burned man in an Italian villa and the nurse who tends him in the final months of World War II — Ondaatje's Booker Prize winner shares Oscar and Lucinda's formal ambition, its lyrical prose, and its portrait of two people whose love is inseparable from a catastrophic project; where Oscar and Lucinda's catastrophe is a glass church, The English Patient's is a world war
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