6.8 /10 1 Votes
Country Australia Publication date 9 May 2006 Originally published 9 May 2006 Genre Novel OCLC 62331104 | 3.4/5 Goodreads Language English Pages 272 pp Preceded by My Life as a Fake | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Cover artist Jenny Grigg
Tomek Sikora (photo) Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Publishers Alfred A. Knopf (Australia & US), Faber and Faber (UK) Similar Peter Carey books, Novels | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Theft: A Love Story is a novel by Australian writer Peter Carey. It won the 2006 Vance Palmer Prize, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award prize for fiction.
Contents
Plot Summary
Theft is the story of Michael "Butcher" Boone, an Australian artist whose career is having an early and comprehensive twilight. He is guardian, babysitter and caretaker for his "damaged two hundred and twenty pound brother", Hugh. "There is always Hugh," Butcher says, "and you cannot take a slash or park the truck without considering him." As the novel opens, Butcher is fresh out of jail for robbing his ex-wife of his own paintings, paintings that became hers when the marriage ended. Exiled to a remote house owned by a fussy former patron, Butcher is trying to get his career back on track, avoid his creditors and manage Hugh, when - on a stormy, flooding evening - he receives a visit from the mysterious Marlene, described by Hugh as "a GAMINE with tiny boobies and a silk dress you could have fitted in your pocket with your hanky".
Through marriage to Olivier Liebovitz, Marlene is the holder of the droit moral, the hereditary right to authenticate paintings, in this case those of Olivier's dead father, Jacques Liebovitz. Somehow, Butcher and Hugh's farmer neighbour has recently acquired a Liebovitz of mysterious provenance, and Marlene arrives, a vision in Manolo Blahniks tramping through knee-deep mud, to put a validating stamp on it, immediately sending its worth into the stratosphere.