Cirrus@Austlit

'In his fiction, Steven Carroll stretches and slows time. He combines this with deliberate over-explaining and repetition, the echoing of memories and ideas, coincidence, and theatricality. A distinctive rhythm results: when reading his work, I often find myself nodding in time to the words. Occasionally – and it happens now and again in his new novel, A New England Affair – the prose starts to resemble a pizza with too many toppings. Mostly, though, Carroll’s approach to fiction succeeds even when it seemingly shouldn’t. If it’s a mystery – a minor miracle, even – that the various techniques he employs come together to create stylised and yet fresh prose, then that mystery itself becomes part of the pleasure of reading a Carroll novel.' (Introduction)