(Oscar Hopkins is an Oxford seminarian with a passion for gambling. Lucinda Leplastrier is a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass. The year is 1864. When they meet on the boat to Australia their lives will be forever changed ...Daring, rich, intense and bizarre, Peter Carey's Booker prize-winning novel is a brilliant achievement - a moving love story and a historical tour de force that is also powerfully contemporary.

Ralph Fiennes, who stars in the film version of Oscar and Lucinda, reads a nicely abridged version of Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel. The audio captures much of the book's vibrant prose, delicately eliminating minor characters and digressions. Lucinda's sudden appearance in London is even more abrupt and confusing than in the book, but Fiennes's carefully clipped British pronunciation helps make things clearer. Not only is he a better actor on tape than in the movie, but he becomes a superb storyteller as well, evoking multiple characters with supreme mastery of pitch, pace, and tone.

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