Parrot and Olivier in America

Parrot and Olivier in America is Peter Carey's 2009 novel that reimagines Charles Dickens's American Notes through a fictional lens. The narrative follows two outsiders - a convict turned servant and an exiled French aristocrat - as they journey through 19th-century America, each observing and documenting a nation in flux with wit, skepticism, and growing attachment.

Carey structures the novel as an alternating testimony between Parrot, a lowborn Australian transported to England as punishment, and Olivier, a refined French nobleman sent abroad for political exile. Their dual perspectives create a rich, competing account of American society: industrializing cities, frontier ambitions, class anxieties, and the contradictions between democratic ideals and lived reality. The prose moves between formal, period-conscious language and Parrot's rougher vernacular, allowing Carey to explore how geography, birth, and circumstance shape perception and voice.

First published to critical acclaim, the novel won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and established itself as a significant work of contemporary historical fiction. Carey's interest in transformation - of character, nation, and identity - drives the narrative forward while maintaining the intellectual playfulness his readers have come to expect. The book operates simultaneously as adventure, philosophical inquiry, and literary homage.

• Set across America in the early 1800s
• Dual narrators from opposing social backgrounds
• Inspired by Dickens but entirely original in scope and voice
• Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner
• Approximately 650 pages

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