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

Peter Carey is a zoologist who has made more than 80 trips to Antarctica, including research expeditions with the New Zealand Antarctic Programme and the Australian National Antarctic research expedition. He has also worked as a lecturer and expedition leader on many Antarctic cruise ships. Peter has conducted research on penguin behaviour, sea-bird ecology, fish physiology and the social behaviour of seals. He visits Antarctica every summer and is working to ecologically restore a group of small islands in the Falklands Archipelago. As director of the conservation organisation SAFER (Subantarctic Foundation for Ecosystems Research), he is actively involved in improving the wildlife habitat of these islands. http-//

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