Oscar and Lucinda

Oscar and Lucinda is a novel by the Australian author Peter Carey, published in 1988. It tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, an Anglican priest from Devon, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young heiress from Parramatta, who meet on a ship travelling from England to Australia.

Oscar was raised by a father who was a fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren minister and naturalist, and he has joined the Anglicans in the belief that he has found the more compassionate church. Lucinda owns a glass factory in Sydney and is on her way back from a commercial trip to London. They discover that both of them gamble, and the difference between them is a matter of obsession against compulsion.

Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement at Bellingen, some four hundred kilometres up the coast of New South Wales, and taking that bet changes both their lives. The Guardian noted that the novel owed something to Father and Son, the autobiography of the poet Edmund Gosse, whose father was likewise a naturalist and a minister.