Peter Pierce gets to grip with Carey's latest, Theft: A Love Story, in "The Bulletin", placing it within the author's previous output: "From the first line of Peter Carey's latest novel, Theft, we are buttonholed by a narrator who is persistent, eloquent, perhaps unhinged...The speaker is as confidently importunate as the narrator of Carey's first novel, the comic, picaresque triumph Illywhacker...From the beginning, Theft is ghosted by settings and events from the author's life, but more emphatically by his own earlier fictions. In a book about art fraud and imposture (as it was in My Life as a Fake), the issue of provenance is central. In Theft it resonates more widely to question the authority of stories, and their tellers."
In "The Sydney Morning Herald", Dorothy Johnston has reservations about Dead Set by Kel Robertson, a crime novel set in Canberra; Mandy Sayer is frustrated by No Time for Dancers by Gillian Bouras, a memoir of her late sister; and Andrew Reimer looks at Theft, by someone or other.
