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"Theft: A Love Story"
Author: Peter Carey

Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey writes his most dazzling novel yet, a send-up of the art world, filled with satire about dealers, auction houses, compulsive collectors, forgers, etc. besides the artists themselves. At the same time, he creates two splendid characters through whose limited vision this world is viewed—Michael "Butcher" Boone, a successful avant-garde artist from Australia, now experiencing hard times, and his "slow" brother Hugh, a 220-pound giant with little control over his emotions and a penchant for breaking the little fingers of people who get in his way.
Butcher, who lost his best paintings when they were declared "marital assets" during a particularly nasty divorce, has just been released from jail after trying to steal them back, and he is now living in the "boonies" of northern New South Wales, as caretaker for the property of his biggest collector, Jean-Paul Milan. Jean-Paul has given him a place to stay and studio space so he can create new masterpieces (from which he expects a cut). But Butcher is not living alone. He has also become the full-time caretaker of his brother, "Hugh the Poet and Hugh the Murderer, Hugh the Idiot Savant," and life is not easy for either of them.
Theft is brilliantly constructed, and in Butcher and Hugh, Carey creates two narrators the reader cannot help but care about. No aspect of the art world and the rarified atmosphere of its collectors escapes Carey's rapier wit, and the humour is non-stop. Well known for his word play and sense of the absurd throughout his novels, Carey has outdone himself with this novel, one of his best - a comic masterpiece.