Peter Careys novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplaister is both a moving and beatiful love story and a historical tour de force. Made for each other the two are gamblers- one obsesive, the other compulsive- incapable of wining at the game of love.

"A novel of extraordinary richness, complexity and strength ... it brings the past, in all its differences , bewilderingly into our present. It fills me with wild, savage envy and no novelist could say fairer than that" Angela Carter