Carpentaria Audiobook By Alexis Wright cover art

Carpentaria

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Carpentaria

By: Alexis Wright
Narrated by: Isaac Drandich
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $19.49

Buy for $19.49

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel
Carpentaria is Alexis Wright's second novel, an epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, Australia. Wright's storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, farce and politics. The novel teems with extraordinary characters - Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, the queen of the rubbish-dump Angel Day and her sea-faring husband Normal Phantom, the fish-embalming king of time - figures that stride like giants across this storm-swept world.

Winner of the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

©2008 Alexis Wright (P)2008 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd. Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Editorial reviews

A rich and inventive tapestry of interwoven tales set among the aborigines of northwestern Queensland, Australia. Author Alexis Wright experiments with both form and language to create a startlingly original story that's both tragic and comic, using tales that blend the political with the mythological, the local and the universal. Although sometimes challenging, listeners are likely to enjoy the trip, and the novel coheres in startling ways at its center. Performer Isaac Drandich's deep, friendly voice provides an accessible narration that counterbalances some of the more challenging material.

Critic reviews

"Wright breaks all the rules of grammar and syntax to sweep us along on a great torrent of language that thrills and amazes with its inventiveness and humour and with the sheer power of its storytelling. It's brutal and confronting and it's sad and funny at the same time. Like the Gulf Country itself, this is big enough to lose yourself in." ( Sydney Morning Herald).
"A swelling, heaving tsunami of a novel: stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humour, sweetened by spiralling lyricism and swaggering with the confident promise of a tale dominated by risk, roguery and revelation." ( The Australian)
All stars
Most relevant  
A fabulous tale, set in the small town of Desperance, on the Gulf of Carpentaria (northwest Queensland), which makes good use of Indigenous people’s perspectives and everyday conversations—in English—as they navigate life and events in and around the white/mixed settlement there. Complicating the situation is an international mining operation that seeks to exploit the region’s resources. The “plot” in Carpentaria is less the story than are the key characters and unpredictable happenings and personal interactions that make it up. The writing, too, I would say, is an intimate part of the story—not in terms of "how the tale got written" (as with some modern stories that dwell on that) but rather how it is BEING TOLD, by Wright. This is a brilliant one-off thing, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where the tale can’t be separated from the telling. And, yes, to my mind, this is Nobel-level writing: most every sentence is an artistic expression of the first order! The characters live and breath as individual persons in this world (at least in the particular moment in which they exist), and yet they are buffeted by social and natural forces beyond their control. Nature, too—the sea, the sky, the land, the weather, the bloody spinifex grass—is a major “character” in the work, as are local history and “the dreaming.” Everything comes together and makes brilliant sense. It’s a phenomenal novel by an outstanding writer!
And the reading, by the way, by Isaac Drandic, an experienced theatrical director, is more than up to the task. In fact, the Audible version adds a whole new dimension to the written novel. Drandic expertly moves from character to character, from moment to moment, conveying in perfectly dramatized form the “feeling” of events and dialogue, tapping into the roots of local knowledge, local emotion, and making it all live in the recording as it might not even do on the page (especially for non-Australians). A consummate performance!

Phenomenal work!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I couldn't continue listening so I am going to buy the book. The story is important and well written but the narrator ruined it for me.

Would you be willing to try another one of Isaac Drandich’s performances?

Never!

Mumbling narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Not enough plot for my taste. Once the drowned fisherman shows up, it is too slow.

Great performance

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It is a ridiculous depressing book. I want a refund. Please refund. Terrible, boring book.

Hated this book. I want a refund.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Whimsical with little or no direction...little substance but good narrator who tries to maake sense out of nonsense...couldn't finish it

disappointing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.