Cirrus@Austlit

'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.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'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.

'One suburban morning in Summer 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, realises that his suburb is 100 years old. He contacts the Mayor, who assembles a Committee, and celebrations are eagerly planned. That same morning, just a few streets way, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband's snores. It is years since Vic moved north, and left their house of empty silences, yet his life remains bound up with hers. Their son, too, has moved on - Michael is at university, exploring new ideas and the heady world of grown-up love. Yet Rita still stubbornly stays in the old street, unable to imagine leaving the house she has tended so lovingly for so long. Instead she has taken on the care of another house as well - that of the widowed Mrs Webster, owner of the suburb's landmark factory, now in decline. As these lives entwine, and the Committee commissions its centenary mural and prepares to commemorate Progress, History - in the shape of the new, post-war generation represented by Michael and his friends - is heading straight for them...'

(Source: Publisher's blurb)

'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.

'Carroll ... transmutes the grey facts of daily life into light and luminous art.' Geordie Williamson, the Australian.' (Publication summary)

'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 powerful novel of a time, a city and a woman, The Year of the Beast is Steven Carroll at his best. A rhythmic, insistent and pulsing novel that tells a compelling story of mothers, families, and what it means to be an individual, standing against the surge of the crowd.'  (Publication summary)