'A woman writes a story for her married lover. Something she always thought of as a fairy tale. A fairy tale with a dark side, like the best of fairy tales...' Occupied France, 1943. In Paris, the city is emblazoned with the black, red and white swastika flags of the German invading forces. It is a city that has been cowed into a shameful submission, a city of whispers and secrets and illegal posters pasted up all around the city that call on people to rise up and fight, which are torn down the next day. A woman working for a prestigious publishing house, in this city under German control, starts an illicit affair with the distinguished publisher, a married man. He introduces her to the Resistance, and she comes to have a taste for the clandestine life, finding a secret thrill in her brushes with danger and the drug of secrecy, danger and freedom. She has never felt more alive.After the war, to prove something to her lover, the woman writes...

'He is one of the best we've ever had' Geraldine BrooksOne of Australia's finest and most critically acclaimed writers returns with a powerful novel that brings his sweeping Glenroy series to a magnificent close. Melbourne, 1917: the times are tumultuous, the city is in the grip of a kind of madness. The Great War is raging, and it is the time of the hotly contested second conscription referendum. Fights are raging on the streets, rallies for 'YES' and 'NO' facing off against each other on opposing corners. Men, women and children, jostling, brawling, fighting and spitting. Through these streets walks Maryanne, forty years old, unmarried and seven months pregnant. These are uncertain, dangerous times for a woman in her position. And she is facing a difficult choice - a choice which gets more urgent by the day - whether to give her child up for adoption as the Church insists she does, or to keep her child and face an uncertain future.An extraordinary...

That exotic tribe was us. And the time we have taken, our moment.One summer morning in 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, pronounces his Melbourne suburb one hundred years old.That same morning, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband's snores, yet it is years since Vic moved north. Their son, Michael, has left for the city, and is entering the awkward terrain of first love.As the suburb prepares to celebrate progress, Michael's friend Mulligan is commissioned to paint a mural of the area's history. But what vision of the past will his painting reveal?Meanwhile, Rita's sometime friend Mrs Webster confronts the mystery of her husband's death. And Michael discovers that innocence can only be sustained for so long.The Time We Have Taken is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change.'a writer worth...

The history of his summer is written in the grass ... In 1960 the West Indies arrive in Australia, bringing with them a carnival of music, colour and possibility. Michael, who is sixteen, is enthralled. If, like his heroes, he has the gift of speed, he will move beyond his suburb into the great world ... And yet, as his summer unfolds, Michael realises that there are other ways to live. When the calypso chorus accompanying Frank Worrell and his team fades, Michael has learnt many things ... about his parents, his suburb, a girl called Kathleen Marsden, and about himself. The Gift of Speed is a masterful blend of story-telling, memorable characters and a uniquely Australian sensibility by a novelist at the height of his powers. ′A must-read′ Bookseller+Publisher ′If, as they say, the past is another country, then Carroll is the ideal guide′ Sydney Morning Herald ′Rarely has...

On a hot summer′s night in the 1950s, the old and the new, diesel and steam, town and country all collide -- and nobody will be left unaffected As a passenger train leaves Spencer Street Station on its haul to Sydney, a family of three -- Vic, Rita and their son Michael -- are off to a party. George Bedser has invited the whole neighbourhood to celebrate the engagement of his daughter. Vic is an engine driver, with dreams of being like his hero Paddy Ryan and becoming the master of the smooth ride. As the neighbours walk to the party, we are drawn into the lives of a bully, a drunk, a restless girl and a young boy forced to grow up before he is ready. The Art of the Engine Driver is a luminous and evocative tale of ordinary suburban lives, told with an extraordinary power. ′subtle, true and profoundly touching′ Le Monde ′exquisitely crafted ... fresh and irresistible′ Miles...

The latest novel by acclaimed novelist Steven Carroll, winner of the Prime Minister's Award and the Miles Franklin Award. 'And is nostalgia not so much a longing for a place or a time, as a longing for youth itself?' Forever Young is set against the tumultuous period of change and uncertainty that was Australia in 1977. Whitlam is about to lose the federal election, and things will never be the same again. the times they are a'changing. Radicals have become conservatives, idealism is giving way to realism, relationships are falling apart, and Michael is finally coming to accept that he will never be a rock and roll musician. A subtle and graceful exploration of the passage of time and our yearning for the seeming simplicities of the past, Forever Young is a powerfully moving work - clear. beautiful, affecting - by one of our greatest authors. 'This fine novel ... ' Peter Pierce The Australian 'A very fine and significant achievement' Adelaide Advertiser 'There is plenty going on...

′This beautiful and poetically attentive novel retrieves a warm, beating heart from Eliot′s haunted, stark, magnificent work of art′ AUSTRALIAN LITERARY REVIEW They may never have a life together, but they will have their moment. They will have this much. England, September 1934 Two young lovers, Catherine and Daniel, have trespassed into the rose garden of Burnt Norton, an abandoned house in the English countryside. Hearing the sound of footsteps, they hide, and then witness the poet T.S. (′Tom′) Eliot and his close friend Emily enter the garden and bury a mysterious tin in the earth.Tom and Emily knew each other in America in their youth; now in their forties, they have come together again. But Tom is married, and his wife has no intention of letting him go. What is it that binds Tom and Emily together? What happens when the muse steps out of the shadows?In the enclosed world of an English village...

The latest, immensely moving novel of lost love and missed moments from Steven Carroll, one of Australia's greatest writers, multi-award winner of the Miles Franklin Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Prime Minister's Literary Award 'Why do some nights feels as though they were always waiting to happen? Or have already happened and will again? And why don't we know it then? Why is it only afterwards we say, yes, that was when my life turned?' 1965. The great poet, TS Eliot, is dead. Hearing the news, the seventy-two year old Emily Hale points her Ford Roadster towards the port of Gloucester, where a fishing boat will take her out to sea, near the low, treacherous rocks called the Dry Salvages, just off Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Over the course of that day, clutching a satchel of letters, Emily Hale slips between past and present, reliving her life with Eliot – starting with that night in 1913, the moment when her life turned, when the young Tom Eliot and Emily Hale...

The thing that makes you, it never goes. A sleek high-speed train glides silently through the French countryside, bearing Michael, an Australian writer, and his travelling world of memory and speculation. Melbourne, 1946, calls to him: the pressure cooker of the city during World War II has produced a small creative miracle, and at this pivotal moment the lives of his newly married parents, a group of restless artists, a proud old woman with a tent for a home, a journalist, a gallery owner, a farmer and a factory developer irrevocably intersect. And all the while the Spirit of Progress, the locomotive of the new age, roars through their lives like time's arrow, pointing to the future and the post-war world only some of them will enter.'Reading SPIRIT OF PROGRESS was one of the most enjoyable things I have done for a long time ... If Graham Greene can have the phrase "Greene-land" used to celebrate his fictional world, I hope Steven Carroll gets recognition for...