The Tax Inspector

‘The sheer exuberance and heightened visual power of Mr. Carey's prose is, sentence by sentence, as brilliant and pleasurable as ever, no matter how dark his vision.’ The Globe and Mail

From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business - and her family - with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire - and himself into an angel - the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror. THE TAX INSPECTOR is a dark and brilliant achievcement, a work of astonishing originality by one of the masters of the contemporary novel.

'Carey writes beautiful sentences, worked on but not laboured; his descriptive passages sweep us along and leave us in some felicitous unanticipated place.' The New York Times

'Carey won the Booker Prize in 1988 with OSCAR AND LUCINDA. His new novel is shorter, braver, more painful and even better…If you only have time to read one new novel, make it THE TAX INSPECTOR.' Victoria Glendinning, The Times

'His work has a wild, chance-like quality, an eye for the grotesque, that puts him in harmony with the spirit of his age.' Chicago Tribune

'THE TAX INSPECTOR is glorious entertainment, storytelling at its best, a piece of richly cominc invention told slant, upside down and inside out…' Boston Sunday Globe 'A brilliant, powerful and dangerous writer. Dangerous because to read his book involves a loss of innocence.' Courier-Mail

‘THE TAX INSPECTOR is a major work in style and vision... [Carey is] in the prime of his creative life...’ The Montreal Gazette

‘The sheer exuberance and heightened visual power of Mr. Carey's prose is, sentence by sentence, as brilliant and pleasurable as ever, no matter how dark his vision.’ The Globe and Mail

‘THE TAX INSPECTOR is a lurid, funny, gritty novel.’ Jay McInerney