Peter Carey 
Long Way from Home 

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher whose job it is to call out the turns, the grids, the creek crossings on a map that will finally remove them, without warning, from the lily-white Australia they know so well. Set in the 1950s amid the consequences of the age of empires, this funny, brilliantly vivid and lively novel reminds us how Europeans took possession of a timeless culture — the high purpose they invented and the crimes they committed along the way.