Miguel Syjuco's first novel, a dazzling and virtuosic adventure in reading, won the Man Asian Literary prize while still in manuscript. It opens with the body of Crispin Salvador, a renowned Filipino novelist, found half-naked in New York's Hudson river. A deeply controversial figure in his home country and in several others, Crispin had battalions of eloquent enemies...A confetti-fall of rumours has always swirled around him. He danced naked with Germaine Greer at Yaddo, insulted George Solti, vomited into the chowder at a dinner party hosted by George Plimpton, earned the public disdain of the seafaring novelist Patrick O'Brian, had a shouting match with Imelda Marcos and a love-life that would have wearied Jack Kennedy...There are stories within stories, frequent references to real people (including Syjuco himself), digressions that at first seem bizarre or jarringly out-of-place but resolve themselves brilliantly in a finger-snap. And there's a capaciousness that makes the book richly attractive to wander into. This is a novel featuring blog entries, essays, emails, newspaper editorials, extracts from interviews, even a blurb from a Guardian book review – a whole rattlebag of documents and contesting perspectives – and it fizzes with the effervescence a large book can have when its author is in total control of the material...this is a remarkably impressive and utterly persuasive novel. - Reviewed in The Guardian

Two-time Booker winner Peter Carey is finally giving us some love. The Australian writer has been holed up in America for 20 years, but always setting his fantastic novels someplace else. Sure, "Theft" (2006) dropped in briefly on the Manhattan art scene, and "His Illegal Self" (2008) began in New York City, but it was desperate to get away and flew off to Sydney by page 23. Even now that he's finally dared to write about his long-term hosts, he comes dressed not as a fellow resident but as our most famous visitor: Alexis de Tocqueville. His new wanderlusting novel, "Parrot & Olivier in America," whips up that young Frenchman who sailed to the United States in 1831 and described this democratic experiment with more insight and prescience than anyone before or since. Tocqueville, recast here in garish tones as Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont, strolls out of his famous "Democracy in America" and into the pages of this kaleidoscopic story along with the whole grasping, bragging, bargaining cast of our ravenous nation. It's another feat of acrobatic ventriloquism, joining Carey's masterpieces...Carey's most marvelous invention is Tocqueville's traveling companion. In real life, the French commissioner toured America with his insightful young friend Gustave de Beaumont. But here Olivier is accompanied by a 49-year-old engraver-spy-servant named John Larrit, or Parrot, "the sort of narrow eyed and haughty character on whose account one might wisely cross the road." For dramatic purposes, it's a brilliant alteration of history and a source of rich comedy in what quickly becomes an early 18th-century "Odd Couple." - Reviewed in the Washington Post