Amnesia

From the two-time Booker Prize winner: an exhilarating, exceedingly timely new novel—at once dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny—that journeys to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international power politics.

When Gaby Baillieux released the Angel Worm virus into Australia's prison system, hundreds of asylum seekers walked free. And because the Americans run the prisons—as they do so many parts of her country—the doors of some 5,000 jails in the US also opened. Was this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? What, if anything, does it have to do with the largely-forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975? Felix Moore—known to himself as "Australia's last serving left-wing journalist"—is determined to write Gaby's biography in order to find the answers, to save her, to save his career, and perhaps to save his country. But how to get Gaby to cooperate? Bringing together the world of hackers and radicals with the "special relationship" between the United States, the CIA, and Australia, Amnesia is Peter Carey at his best, a novel that speaks powerfully about our history but most urgently about our present.