Author(s): Peter Carey

Aust Fiction

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.