This volume explores Carey's position not only as a great entertainer but also as a disturbing post-colonial writer, setting his work in relation to his life and his influences. Woodcock, using previously neglected radio interviews amongst other documents, sees Carey as a fictional shadow-maker, whose characters often inhabit the unpredictable borderlands of experience. Commenting on the fabulist, surrealist and postmodernist elements, the author also stresses the political concerns of Carey's fiction, and presents him as a hybrid writer who relishes the diversity of his varied imagining and his own capacity to take risks with his fiction.