Returning 'home' under threat of execution, he inveigles his way into a household in Great Queen Street, where he's quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements-and where he falls under the hypnotic scrutiny of Tobias Oates, a celebrated young writer fascinated by the process of mesmerism and obsessed with the criminal mind.

Jack Maggs, a foundling trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported to Australia, has now reversed his fortunes-and seeks to fulfill his well-concealed, innermost desire. He might not yet know where he was, or what he knew, but he felt the power of that troubled mind like a great wind rushing through a broken window pane.'Jack Maggs is a dazzling tale of obsession, and Jack Maggs stands as a remarkable character, a resurrected antipodean lag returned to England for vengeance and reconciliation.' -Thomas Keneally From the Booker Prize-winning author, a vivid and robust novel of Dickensian London-a place and a story teeming with mystery, science, and passion. W hen he entered the soul of Jack Maggs, it was as if he had entered the guts of a huge and haunted engine. Thus Maggs’ inner and outer stories entwine with the novelist’s own. For the writer, Tobias Oates, he is a case study of the criminal mind and extraordinary raw material for a novel. To the terrified onlookers, he becomes a monster in their midst. Mesmerised, Maggs takes off his shirt to reveal the scars of the lash across his back. It’s explained as a kind of psychotherapy in which the demons of the mind will be released. Here are more stories – of the maid, Mercy, Buckle’s young mistress, who falls for Maggs and Constable, the other footman, rogered by the dashing Phipps, who lives across the street but is hiding out in his club and the novelist, Tobias Oates, who comes to dinner and applies his skill with mesmerism to hypnotise the phoney footman, Maggs. The novel’s story begins with Maggs’s disguising himself as a footman in the eccentric establishment of Percy Buckle, bookloving fishmonger turned sham gent by another unlikely windfall. He is determined to deliver his history, his own sorry apologia, written in mirror-writing and invisible ink, at the heart of which is the secret memory of an innocent girl hung by the law. Now Maggs comes back in person, unlawfully, wanting recognition from Phipps, whom he regards as a son.

The boy, Henry Phipps, has grown up a gentleman, thanks to the money the convict, Jack Maggs, has regularly remitted from the colony.

A convict, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, returns to London intent on finding the boy who years before did him a kindness. Let me gropingly try to lead you through it.

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey