Oscar and Lucinda is a novel by Australian author Peter Carey which won the 1988 Booker Prize and the 1989 Miles Franklin Award. This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. Oscar and Lucinda each bet their inheritance that a glass church can be made and delivered by Oscar to Hasset at Boat Harbour on Good Friday. Oscar and Lucinda are meant for each other, but they have to fight through society's rules and Oscar's fear of water. In both Waterland and Oscar and Lucinda, images of glass are conflated with images of water and the reader is left to wonder "What is the connection between the two?" In mid-1800s England, Oscar is a young Anglican priest, a misfit and an outcast, but with the soul of an angel. ISBN-13: 9780679777502. A brave and original novel. The gamblers are his grandparents, two 19th century eccentrics, driven by faith and temptation, who find they are freed to practice the first by indulging in the second. is sometimes too slow, and its energetic whimsicality can be grating. Oscar is an Oxford-educated, High Anglican priest, while Lucinda, the inheritor of a substantial fortune, is the proprietor of one of the colony’s pioneering glassworks factories. On an australian farm, Lucinda Leplastrier was tutored by her intelligent mother, a woman who took part in the early feminist movement. Oscar and Lucinda Peter Carey, 1988 Knopf Doubleday 443 pp. The final scene of Oscar and Lucinda, in which the glass church is destroyed and consumed by water, functions as another important encounter between water and glass. Australian director Gillian Armstrong directed this Laura Jones adaptation of Peter Carey's 1988 booker prize-winning novel. The scene of the glass church floating down the river is pretty cool. Directed by Gillian Armstrong. It was shortlisted for The Best of the Booker. As a boy, even though from a strict Pentecostal family, he felt God told him through a sign to leave his father and his faith and join the Church of England. In a lengthy flashback, Oscar Hopkins' great grandson (Geoffrey Rush) narrates the family history that led to his birth. Against that, though, set writing that is far more often lucid and fine, beautifully drawn characters, and a remarkably clever narrative scheme. Their lives form a love story of enchantment and wicked wit. And yet they gamble. Summary Winner, 1988 Booker Prize. The construction of ''Oscar & Lucinda'' rests upon the same cast-iron framework as the glass church, manufactured by Lucinda for transportation to a remote site on a river in New South Wales, that stands as a symbol of their impossible, chancy union. 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