The first Penguin edition of Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang, with a cover by Michael Leunig As he flees the police, Ned Kelly scribbles his narrative in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose. To his pursuers he is a thief and a murderer. To his own people he's a hero for opposing the English. Ned, who saw his first prison cell at fifteen, has become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over towns and defying authority. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist. There are no sentences like these in all Australian literature and yet they could only have grown from our soil. 'Vastly entertaining . . . Triumphantly eclectic, as if Huck Finn and Shakespeare had joined forces to prettify the legend of Jesse James.' New York Times 'The ingenuity, empathy, and poetic ear that the novelist brings to his feat of imposture cannot be rated too high.'John Updike, The New Yorker 'By turns rambunctious and tender, teeming with life and incident . . . richly imagined, ambivalent and passionate.' James Bradly, The Bulletin