Peter Carey has won the Booker prize twice for his ventures into historical fiction, True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda. Now the acclaimed Australian author is set to address a rather more modern situation in his new novel, Amnesia: the "cyber underworld", with a story of a hacker who unlocks the doors of thousands of prisons across Australia and the US.

Due out in November, Amnesia was announced by publisher Faber this morning. Opening in 2010 – "It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time" – it sees a worm sent into the computerised control systems of hundreds of Australian prisons by a young Australian hacker. The worm goes on to infect jails across America, "because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations".

"Wherever it went, it travelled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: THE CORPORATION IS UNDER OUR CONTROL. THE ANGEL DECLARES YOU FREE," writes Carey as the novel opens.

"Has a young Australian woman declared cyber war on the United States? Or was her Angel Worm intended only to open the prison doors of those unfortunates detained by Australia's harsh immigration policies? Did America suffer collateral damage? Is she innocent? Can she be saved?" asked the publisher as it unveiled the novel, adding that Carey's books have sold more than one million copies in the UK alone.

Editor Angus Cargill called Amnesia "a thrilling and witty journey to the place where the cyber underworld of radicals and hackers collides with international power politics", and said it "could not be more timely".

Carey's Booker-winning novels take place in more distant times: Oscar and Lucinda is set in 1864, as Oxford seminarian Oscar Hopkins meets Sydney heiress Lucinda Leplastrier on the boat to Australia. True History of the Kelly Gang, meanwhile, allows the outlaw Ned Kelly, hung in 1880, to speak for himself: "I lost my own father at 12 yrs of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in hell if I speak false."

Carey has set books in current times: his most recent novel, The Chemistry of Tears, takes place in London 2010 – with a back story in 1850s Germany – while His Illegal Self also has a modern setting. The author is best known for weaving history into his fiction, however, from his retelling of Great Expectations, Jack Maggs, to Parrot and Olivier in America, in which a French aristocrat sets sail for the New World.