His Illegal Self
By Peter Carey
Faber £16.99, 300 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

Peter Carey has an exuberant writing style and a dazzling imagination but he is, in a sense, a single-issue author. In a celebrated career spanning four decades, which has seen him move from surreal short stories to the grand historical epics that won him two Booker prizes, he has returned obsessively to one preoccupation: the difficulty of belonging in Australia.