Amnesia - Tapa dura

It is the story of WikiLeaks as if transmogrified by Dickens and turned into a thrilling fable for our post-Edward Snowden era. (Luke Harding Guardian)

Exhilarating, the first Australian comedy-conspiracy-cyber thriller. It even has a viral twist at the end. As I said, Carey can do anything. (James Runcie, The Independent)

Often rumbustiously funny, it has an almost Dickensian zest for colourful characters... Metaphorical vitality pulses through Carey's prose. (Peter Kemp The Sunday Times)

Amnesia crackles with energy, inventive in its language... but never pretentious, emphasizing the value of straight talking and laughter. Carey's first concern, for all his righteous rage is to ensure that he provides rollicking entertainment. (Jake Kerridge, Daily Express)

Never have I read a novel in which I could see the genius of the writer's mind so phenomenally at work. The physical descriptions are extraordinary. The language is ecstatic. (Carmen Callil)

A sharply contemporary take on global politics as hackers and political outcasts are pitted against the establishment. (Alison Walsh, Irish Independent)

A deeply engaging book. It responds to some of the biggest issues of our time, and reminds us that no other contemporary novelist is better able to mix farce with ferocity, or to better effect. (Andrew Motion, Guardian)

Carey has twice the energy of most writers. (Tim Martin Daily Telegraph)

Carey says a great deal in an entertaining, provocative novel, weighty with polemical intent, yet he never forgets to tell a story that is as large as life and as exuberantly complicated, and, as regards setting the record straight, long overdue. If fiction can summon the now, this novel has. (Eileen Battersby, Irish Times)

Exhiliratingly suffused with Carey's wild prodigality of invention ... Amnesia glitters with verbal inventiveness and pungent characterisation. (Jane Shilling, Evening Standard)

When Gaby Bailleux released the Angel Worm into Australia's prison system, allowing hundreds of asylum seekers to walk free, she also let the cat out of the bag. The Americans ran the prisons, like so many parts of her country, and so the doors of some 5000 American places of incarceration also opened. Both countries' secrets threatened to pour out. Was this a mistake, or had Gaby declared cyberwar on the US? Felix Moore - known to himself as 'Australia's last serving left wing journalist' - has no doubt. Her act was part of the covert conflict between Australia and America. That conflict dates back to the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane in 1943, stretches forward to America's security interests in Pine Gap and commercial interests everywhere, and has as its most outrageous act the coup of 1975. Funded by his property-developer mate Woody Townes, Felix is going to write Gaby's biography, to save her, and himself, and maybe his country. But how to get Gaby to co-operate? What role does her film-star mother have to play? And what, after all, does Woody really want?