Peter Carey's His Illegal Self is due out in February according to Perry at Matilda. I mentioned it back in March.

Carey doesn't make the list of likely recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is due to be announced next month. Oz and Murakami are on it, so that's some justification for my rabid endorsement of these two supremely talented writers. As an Israeli, Oz is more likely than Murakami, whose compatriot Kenzaburo Oe won it in 1994.

I don't normally acknowledge lit prizes, or not recently at least, but the Nobel is different from all the rest.

In Carey's new book, for which Perry is indebted to Amazon for the blurb, the protagonist is named Che. It is "an achingly beautiful story" says the Knopf Web site. The story involves "the love between a young woman and a little boy", which seems likely to cause comment among the politically correct. What form that love takes is, however, not detailed at all. At all.