My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey

In Melbourne in the 1940s, a conservative young poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach the country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubb's imagination. Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but its editor is prosecuted for publishing obscenity. During the trial, someone uncannily resembling the man in the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle leaps to his feet. At this moment the horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he has himself manufactured.

Peter Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how the phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to the seedy, sweaty, tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur.

A manic, endearing and penetrating ode to fakery at its most truthful and truth at its most fake, My Life As a Fake penetrates to the heart of the alchemy of literature itself.

Peter Carey is the multi- award- winning author of eight novels, plus two highly acclaimed collections of short stories. His books have won or been short-listed for every major literary award in Australia. He has won the Booker Prize twice - in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang and in 1988 for Oscar And Lucinda. In 1998 he won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Jack Maggs and won it again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. True History of the Kelly Gang was also shortlisted for 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Peter Carey now lives in New York.