In book after book, Peter Carey has proven that he's incapable of writing a dull page. He's a literary Robin Hood, stealing from rich moments of history or literature and giving to poor readers. The brazenness of his recent projects makes their success all the more exciting. In "Jack Maggs" (1998), he dared to finish off Dickens's "Great Expectations." In "True History of the Kelly Gang" (2001), he mythologized Australia's greatest robber.

Reading his new work, "My Life As a Fake," about a celebrated case of fraud after World War II, is like falling into an Escher drawing. With stories nested in stories, narrators narrating the narratives of other narrators - it all sounds like the kind of poststructural challenge A.S. Byatt would twist into a migraine of complexity, but Carey never forgets that it's about entertaining a reader. As the Booker Prize has noted - twice - he's one of the greatest storytellers alive, the perfect qualification for this novel all about storytelling.

Miss Sarah Wode- Douglass introduces herself as the editor of a London poetry magazine who has long hated a popular poet named John Slater. "He was an appallingly unapologetic narcissist," she writes, who played a suspicious role in her mother's suicide decades earlier when Sarah was a child. Determined to end her confirmed chilliness toward him, Slater proposes she accompany him to Malaysia, the country that inspired his first collection of poetry. The 10-day trip, all expenses paid, will give them a chance to talk. "We must talk," he insists. "It is very bad that we never have."

She gives in to his plea, but he sleeps through the entire flight, and as soon as they arrive in Malaysia, he flits off to pursue his own interests. Angry with him and bored of editing in her room, one afternoon she wanders outside the hotel and spots a grotesque Australian named Chubb, "a strange and fragile creature, powerless, pathetic, filled with pride and self-importance." He wants her to read a decaying page of verse by Bob McCorkle, but she already knows the story of that notorious hoax.

Just after the war, Chubb destroyed another young poetry editor by submitting a collection of cobbled-together verse. He invented "Bob McCorkle," an unschooled genius, now deceased, and a sister who sent in the poems along with a manufactured photo and a description of her brother's simple life. The editor fell for it just as Chubb hoped he would, but the prank quickly spun out of control, becoming the subject of a scandal and then an obscenity trial, which inspired the humiliated editor to kill himself.

Of course, the incident ended Chubb's own writing career, and Sarah can't imagine why he should approach her now to replay that ghastly farce. "Chubb had preyed on the best, most vulnerable quality an editor has to offer," she seethes. "I mean that hopeful, optimistic part which has you reading garbage for half your life just so you might find, one day before you die, a great and unknown talent."

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