Oscar and Lucinda was published by University of Queensland Press in 1988 and won the Booker Prize. Oscar Hopkins, an English clergyman with a gambling compulsion, meets Lucinda Leplastrier, an Australian heiress who owns a glassworks and shares his addiction. Their mutual obsession leads to an extraordinary wager: Oscar will transport a prefabricated glass church on a barge up a river through the wilderness of New South Wales to a remote settlement. The journey will test whether faith — in God, in each other, in the possibility of beauty surviving transport through hostile territory — can survive contact with reality.
The glass church is one of the great metaphors in Australian literature: a fragile, beautiful, absurd object dragged through a landscape that is indifferent to human aspirations. It represents everything the European colonizers brought to Australia — their religion, their aesthetics, their ambition — and the violence that the transportation of these things required.
Collecting Oscar and Lucinda
First edition (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1988): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Australian first edition, fine in jacket: $150–$400
- UK first edition (Faber): $75–$200
- US first edition (Harper & Row): $40–$100
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Booker Prize winner, Carey’s masterpiece.
The Glass Church
Two compulsive gamblers — Oscar Hopkins, an Anglican clergyman raised in rural Devon, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an Australian heiress who owns a glass factory — meet on a ship to Australia and make a wager: Oscar will transport a glass church across the New South Wales wilderness to a remote settlement. The wager is at once a love story, a colonial adventure, and a metaphor for the beautiful fragility of human ambition. Carey won the Booker Prize in 1988, and the novel was adapted into a 1997 film with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Peter Carey? Peter Carey (b. 1943) is an Australian novelist who has won the Booker Prize twice — for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). Only J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel share this distinction. Carey has lived in New York City since the 1990s and teaches at Hunter College. His novels characteristically blend Australian history, postcolonial themes, and a baroque, inventive prose style.