Recommendations
Books Like Kelly Gang
Ned Kelly's voice, Australia's myth, and the justice that was never served
If True History of the Kelly Gang gripped you — Ned's breathless semi-literate prose, the armor, the colonial injustice, the sense of a country being invented in real time — these eight novels share its voice, its colonial fury, or its portrait of outlaws at the edge of civilization.
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Oscar and Lucinda
by Peter Carey
A gambling English clergyman and an Australian heiress betting on transporting a glass church through the Outback — Carey's first Booker Prize winner is the obvious companion to True History: the same Australian colonial history, the same prose of extraordinary energy and ambition, and the same sense of a country where ordinary English structures of meaning do not quite work; recommended directly alongside True History for new readers of Carey
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Illywhacker
by Peter Carey
Herbert Badgery, a self-proclaimed liar and illywhacker, telling the story of Australia across 139 years — Carey's second novel and the most formally comparable to True History in its first-person voice of unreliable autobiography, its sweep of Australian national myth, and its sense that Australia's history is inseparable from its compulsive self-mythologizing
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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 domestic-Australian counterpart to True History's colonial-Australian adventure; the same magical realism, the same dense, physical prose, and the same portrait of Australians — ordinary people, not bushrangers — as the subject of serious literary fiction
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Robbery Under Arms
by Rolf Boldrewood
Captain Starlight and the Marston brothers narrating their careers as cattle thieves and outlaws in 1880s Australia — Boldrewood's 1888 novel is the literary ancestor of True History and the novel against which Carey's work defines itself; both narrate Australian outlawry in the first person, but where Boldrewood's attitude is ultimately moralistic and conservative, Carey's is radically sympathetic to Kelly's colonial critique
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The Secret River
by Kate Grenville
William Thornhill, a Thames bargeman transported to Australia for theft, trying to carve a life on the Hawkesbury River while displacing the Aboriginal people who live there — Grenville's Man Booker-shortlisted novel is the colonial-guilt companion to True History's colonial-fury: where Kelly's story is about what the colonial system did to Irish settler families, Thornhill's is about what settler families did to the Aboriginal people whose land they occupied
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Deadwood
by Pete Dexter
Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane in the Deadwood gold camp in 1876 — Dexter's novel is the American counterpart to True History of the Kelly Gang in its portrait of the violent frontier as a place where ordinary social rules are suspended and where the question of justice is decided by proximity to power rather than by law; both novels use the Western or bushranger genre to make a political argument about colonialism
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
A teenage boy joining a gang of scalp hunters on the Texas-Mexico border in 1849 — McCarthy's novel shares True History's willingness to portray frontier violence without moral cushioning, its sense of history as a record of what the powerful do to the powerless, and its prose of extreme intensity; where Kelly's voice is semi-literate and passionate, McCarthy's narrator is cold and almost inhuman, but both are responding to the same historical reality of colonial violence
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Carpentaria
by Alexis Wright
Normal Phantom and the Waanyi people of the Gulf of Carpentaria — Wright's Miles Franklin Award-winning novel is the Aboriginal-Australian companion to True History: where Kelly's story is told from inside the Irish settler experience of colonial injustice, Wright's is told from inside the Aboriginal experience of the same colonial system; both novels use extraordinary prose to recover voices that conventional historical narrative has suppressed
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