Set onboard an ocean liner travelling to Australia in 1864, this novel is both a love story and an historical tour-de-force that relates the developing romance between Oscar Hopkins, an Oxford seminarian, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass. Australian writer Peter Carey is the author of a selection of short stories, "The Fat Man in History" and two novels, "Bliss" and "Illywhacker".
