A Long Way From Home

Neither a road trip nor a state-of-the-nation novel. Instead, it is a domestic drama on wheels, an inquiry into the metaphysics of race, and an antic vehicle for Carey's inimitable and lacerating wit... There are other maps that underlay the one that marks the Redex route: maps of murder, of dispossession. Their encounters with indigenous Australians are tragic, comic and banal.... A Long Way From Home reminds us that great novels are not ideological - neither exploitative nor excessively well-meaning - but tough-minded, complex admissions of failure, guilt and confusion. The Australian