image of person or book cover 6925770147743133019.png
This image has been sourced from online.
y separately published work icon The Gift of Speed single work   novel  
Is part of Glenroy Series Steven Carroll , 2001 series - author novel (number 2 in series)
Issue Details: First known date: 2004... 2004 The Gift of Speed
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Notes

  • Dedication: To Leo
  • The Gift of Speed is framed within the 1960-1961 West Indian cricket tour of Australia.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Pymble, Turramurra - Pymble - St Ives area, Sydney Northern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Fourth Estate , 2004 .
      image of person or book cover 6925770147743133019.png
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 353p.
      Description: port.
      ISBN: 0732278325 (pbk.)
    • Pymble, Turramurra - Pymble - St Ives area, Sydney Northern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Fourth Estate , 2006 .
      image of person or book cover 6565947485941436501.png
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 349p.p.
      ISBN: 9780732288990, 0732288991
    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Harper Perennial , 2006 .
      image of person or book cover 4981999952048261409.png
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 349p.p.
      ISBN: 9780732278335, 0732278333
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Windmill Books ,
      2011 .
      image of person or book cover 7975224707139373127.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 368p.p.
      Reprinted: 2014
      Note/s:
      • Published 7 July 2011 (paperback); 14 July 2014 (ebook).
      ISBN: 9780099537281 (pbk), 9781446494042 (ebk)
    • Pymble, Turramurra - Pymble - St Ives area, Sydney Northern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Fourth Estate , 2012 .
      image of person or book cover 1364594963841359686.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 384p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 18 December 2012
      ISBN: 9781743099698 (ebk).
Alternative title: Un long adieu : roman
Language: French
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Phébus ,
      2006 .
      image of person or book cover 2672974786017471506.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 267p.p.
      ISBN: 9782752902054, 2752902050
      Series: y separately published work icon D'aujourd'hui. Étranger Paris : Phébus , 1994-2009 22055576 1994 series - publisher novel

Works about this Work

The New Historical Novel : Putting Mid-twentieth-century Australia into Perspective Nicholas Birns , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , Autumn vol. 41 no. 1 2018; (p. 7-18)

'This article argues that, since 2004 or so, a new kind of Australian historical novel has emerged among practitioners of literary fiction, one concerned with the mid-twentieth century. This new historical fiction has been characterized by an aesthetic stringency and self-consciousness. Though Steven Carroll and Ashley Hay will be the principal twenty-first-century writers examined, reference will also be made to several other writers including Carrie Tiffany, Charlotte Wood, Sofie Laguna, and to the later work of Peter Carey. In all these contemporary books, technology plays a major role in defining the twentieth century as seen historically.'  (Publication abstract)

 

Colonising Time : Steven Carroll’s Reinvention of Suburbia Brigid Rooney , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 13 no. 2 2013;
'Suburbia is a familiar topos in Australian fiction. Its address to colonisation is mostly oblique, yielded through its focus on the inauthenticity and restlessness of a settler modernity typically sourced in the white Anglo culture of pre 1970s decades. Yet the actual suburbs of postwar Australia are multiplicitous and shifting, always in tension with the imagined terrain of fictional suburbia. My paper explores literary suburbs as constituted by a complex set of orientations towards the real and the imagined. It reads the ways that Steven Carroll’s fictional suburbia indexes real world localities, while simultaneously serving as locus for reinvention of the novel in Australia, through forms of interior consciousness and temporality affiliated with European models of literary modernism. In Spirit of Progress (2011), Carroll's narrative engages with classic Anglo-Australian suburbia as a representational field, working with and against the real of history, even as it mines the seam of suburbia as a site of both colonization and forgetting, and of longing and return.' (Author's abstract)
Celebrating Suburbia Nathanael O'Reilly , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel 2012; (p. 303-334)
Making the Ordinary Extraordinary Gia Metherell , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 21 June 2008; (p. B4)
Present Tense With Meaning Deborah Bogle , 2007 single work column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 10 March 2007; (p. 13)
A Summer in the Life of a Teenager Peter Pierce , 2004 single work review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 31 July 2004; (p. 7a)

— Review of The Gift of Speed Steven Carroll , 2004 single work novel
Celebration of a Moment in a Younger Age Liam Davison , 2004 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 31 July - 1 August 2004; (p. 8-9)

— Review of The Gift of Speed Steven Carroll , 2004 single work novel
Nostalgic Textures James Bradley , 2004 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 263 2004; (p. 56)

— Review of The Gift of Speed Steven Carroll , 2004 single work novel
Playing the Game of Life David Mayocchi , 2004 single work review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 14 August 2004; (p. 6)

— Review of The Gift of Speed Steven Carroll , 2004 single work novel
A Premium Blend Peter Pierce , 2004 single work review
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 24 August vol. 122 no. 6435 2004; (p. 65)

— Review of Ophelia's Fan Christine Balint , 2004 single work novel ; Spirit Wrestlers Thomas Shapcott , 2004 single work novel ; Rhubarb Craig Silvey , 2004 single work novel ; Furies John Charalambous , 2004 single work novel ; The Gift of Speed Steven Carroll , 2004 single work novel
Dark Downs Thriller Stands Tall on Short List Rosemary Sorensen , 2005 single work column
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 22 April 2005; (p. 3)
Prize Fighters Booked for Crack at the Franklin Murray Waldren , 2005 single work column
— Appears in: The Australian , 22 April 2005; (p. 3)
Present Tense With Meaning Deborah Bogle , 2007 single work column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 10 March 2007; (p. 13)
Making the Ordinary Extraordinary Gia Metherell , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 21 June 2008; (p. B4)
Celebrating Suburbia Nathanael O'Reilly , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel 2012; (p. 303-334)
Last amended 13 Jul 2021 12:41:38
Settings:
  • Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,
  • Melbourne City, Melbourne, Victoria,
  • 1960-1961
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