Peter Carey wrote a number of novels on the bookshelf I have dedicated to my favourite books. They’re the ones I would save in a fire or take with me to a desert island if I were to be banished to one: books whose characters will stay with me forever. Books I turn to when I’m lost.

Peter Carey’s Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, The Fat Man in History, My Life as a Fake, Theft: A Love Story, His Illegal Self, and the sometimes overlooked but brilliant The Tax Inspector take up the best part of an entire shelf. (Above and below him sit Don DeLillo, Inga Clendinnen, Janet Malcolm, Colm Tóibín, Annie Proulx, Colum McCann …)

True History of the Kelly Gang was published in 2000 by the University of Queensland Press, which had published each of Carey’s previous books since his first in 1974. Carey stayed for 26 years with the small press who’d got him going, even though he’d no doubt been wined and dined since his early success by suitors from every major publishing house bearing briefcases of cash. I liked his loyalty.

True History of the Kelly Gang was awarded the 2001 Booker prize. It was Carey’s second time on the Booker’s winning podium (firstly for Oscar and Lucinda), only the second person (after JM Coetzee) to win the prestigious award twice.

For some reason, despite the accolades and my appreciation of Carey’s work, it wasn’t until I was living in New York that I cracked the spine of this much lauded story of Australia’s favourite outlaw, Ned Kelly. It was 2009.

Yet there had been plenty pointing me to Kelly. I loved painter Sidney Nolan’s Kelly series. The figure of Kelly often precariously mounted on a galloping horse, depicted almost naively with an oblong black helmet with slits for his eyes and a gun in arm, seemed wild, larrikin and irreverent – aptly Australian.

Then there was Robert Drewe’s extraordinary novel about Kelly, Our Sunshine, its title taken form the term of endearment Ned’s father used for his son, published nine years before True History. Prophetically the blurb on Drewe’s front cover is from Carey who says Our Sunshine will “forever change the way we see Ned Kelly”.

It’s been more than two decades since I read Drewe’s novel, but when I think of it now it still evokes a deep and touching sweetness. The outlaw Ned called “our sunshine” by his father. Carey was right; Drewe did change the way we saw Ned Kelly.

And then came Carey’s take on Kelly, which changed it all over again. Where Drewe was tender, Carey is hard-eyed. And that, I understand now, is why it took me so long to read it. True History is a tough book. The language is tough, the people are tough, the relationships are even tougher, as is the land and the life. The odds are stacked up so highly against everyone your heart gets broken on every page.

Carey’s Kelly had been brewing a long time.

In an interview in the Paris Review, he said, he was 19, “just discovering literature”, when he first imagined a book about Ned Kelly: “I was reading Joyce, and at the same time I read the Jerilderie Letter, a letter written by Ned Kelly in a town where he was robbing a bank. It’s a very Irish voice. I know it’s not Joyce, but it does suggest even to a 19-year-old the possibility of creating a poetic voice that grows out of Australian soil, that is true to its place and hasn’t existed before.”

It was some 38 years later that he tried to capture that uniquely Irish-Australian Kelly voice. Carey was 57 when True History was published and he said around that time: “It was astonishing to me that I could finally do it … I had become addicted to the dangers and pleasures of the novel.” He describes the act of writing “like standing on the edge of a cliff … Every day you’re making up the earth you’re going to stand on.”

I read True History knowing I was in the presence of a writer walking along a knife’s edge of daring and audacity, my stomach churning at Australia’s cruel past.

So how did Carey conjure up True History, this enduring Australian myth writ large, sitting in his New York apartment?

True History is triumphant because Carey has not only made up the earth on which the Kelly family stands so rich and real you can almost smell it, he’s inhabited their voices as well.

Whether it was reading Joyce that gave him that language or it was his own unerring ear, as Carey put it in his interview with the Paris Review, True History of the Kelly Gang is “a book about voices telling stories”.

• Caro Llewellyn is the author of Diving into Glass, and the newly appointed chief executive of The Wheeler Centre