Peter Carey is at his inventive, brilliant best in His Illegal Self, a novel about a family who, once met, will never leave you.

Che is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he yearns for his famous outlaw parents. Soon Che too is an outlaw- fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippie commune in the rainforests of Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. Who is his real mother? Was that his real father? If all he suspects is true, what should he do?