Spirit of Progress

Description

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Number of Pages: 268

SPIRIT OF PROGRESS is the stunning new novel from Miles Franklin Award winner Steven Carroll, based on a Sidney Nolan painting of Carroll’s aunt, and is a compelling prequel to his Glenroy trilogy 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 the Australia herecords. Perhaps it should be called “Carroll-land”.’ BOOKSELLER+PUBLISHER