This book has been translated into Persian by Maliheh Ghodrati. Tehran-based Afkar-e Jadid has released 'Oscar and Lucinda' in 540 pages.

The novel also won the 1989 Miles Franklin Award. It was shortlisted in 2008 for The Best of the Booker, in celebration of the prize's 40th anniversary.

The book tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, an Anglican priest from Devon, England, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress, who are both traveling to Australia by ship. It explores their adventures on the large continent.

They meet on a ship to Australia, where Lucinda has bought a glass factory, having long been fascinated by the material. Oscar had grown up as the son of a fundamentalist Brethren of Plymouth minister and naturalist.

He has used his observation of nature as a sign from God for something less severe, and believes he has joined a more compassionate church with the Anglicans.

The travelers discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive, the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church (which will be built by her factory in Sydney) from there to a remote settlement at Bellingen, some 400 km up the New South Wales coast. This bet changes both their lives forever.

Peter Carey is one of only five writers to have won the Booker Prize twice—the others being J. G. Farrell, J. M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.

He won his first Booker Prize in 1988, for 'Oscar and Lucinda', and won his second Booker Prize in 2001, for 'True History of the Kelly Gang'. In May 2008, he was nominated for the Best of the Booker Prize.

Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times, and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In addition to writing fiction, he collaborated on the screenplay of the film 'Until the End of the World' with Wim Wenders and was, for nineteen years, executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.