The Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky’s Karamozovs. Granny Catchprice runs her family business and her family, with senility, cunning and a handbag full of explosives. Sixteen-year-old Benny dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire, and himself into an angel. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey’s hands, a masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.

Peter Carey’s The Tax Inspector is a wickedly funny satire on modern life and families.