of Carey's career—culminated with the publication of Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won the Booker McConnell Prize (as it was then known) and brought the author international recognition. Carey explained that the novel was inspired, in part, by his time in Bellingen: Move to New York: 1990–present Carey sold his share of McSpedden Carey and in 1990 moved with Alison Summers and their son to New York, where he took a job teaching creative writing at New York University. He later said that New York would not have been his first choice of place to live, and that moving there was his wife's idea. Carey and Summers divorced in 2005 after a four-year separation. Carey is now married to the British-born publisher Frances Coady. The Tax Inspector (1991), begun in Australia, was the first book he completed in the United States. It was followed by The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), a fable in which he explored the relationship between Australia and America, disguised in the novel as "Efica" and "Voorstand". This is a relationship that has preoccupied him throughout his career, going back to Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985), and the early short stories. Nevertheless, Carey continued to set his fiction primarily in Australia and remained diffident about writing explicitly on American themes. In a piece on True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), Mel Gussow reported that: It was only after nearly two decades in the United States that he embarked on Parrot and Olivier in America (2010), loosely based on events in the life of Alexis de Tocqueville. Carey says "Tocqueville opened a door I could enter. I saw the present in the past. It was accessible, imaginable." Carey continues to extend his canvas; in his novel, The Chemistry of Tears (2012), "contemporary London is brought intimately in touch with ... a 19th-century Germany redolent of the Brothers Grimm". Controversies In 1998, Carey was accused of snubbing Queen Elizabeth II by declining an invitation to meet her after winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Jack Maggs (1997). While Carey is a republican, in the Australian sense, he insists that no offence was intended: The meeting did eventually take place, with the Queen remarking, according to Carey, "I believe you had a little trouble getting here." The unhappy circumstances of Carey's break-up with Alison Summers received publicity (largely in Australia) in 2006 when Theft: A Love Story appeared,