THE LOST LIFE
by Steven Carroll
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. In the enclosed world of an English village one autumn, their story becomes entwined with that of Catherine and Daniel, who are certain in their newfound love and full of possibility.
From one of Australia’s finest writers, this is a moving, lyrical novel about poetry and inspiration, the incandescence of first love and the yearning for a life that may never be lived.
Shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award 2010
Shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal 2010
A WORLD OF OTHER PEOPLE
by Steven Carroll
London, 1941, and the threat of daily bombings hangs heavily in the air. Jim, a young Australian pilot in Bomber Command, has suffered an unbearable loss when he meets Iris, a forthright young woman trying to find her voice as a writer. A World of Other People traces their love affair, haunted by secrets and malign coincidence, as they struggle to imagine a future together free of society’s thin-lipped disapproval.
The poet T.S. Eliot, with whom Iris shares fire-watching duties during the Blitz, unwittingly seals their fate with one of the poems from his acclaimed Four Quartets.
Cinematic, intense and unflinching, A World of Other People is a supremely life-affirming evocation of love in war-time, when every decision, and every day, matters.
Shortlisted for the South Australian Premier’s Award 2014
Joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction 2014
FOREVER YOUNG
by Steven Carroll
In 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.
Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2016
Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2016
About the Author
STEVEN CARROLL was born in Melbourne. His first novel, Remember Me, Jimmy James, was published in 1992. This was followed by Momoko (1994), The Love Song of Lucy McBride (1998) and then The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin Award in 2002 and France’s Prix Femina literary award for the Best Foreign Novel in 2005, The Gift of Speed (2004), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005, The Time We Have Taken (2007), which won both the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South-East Asia and South Pacific Region and the Miles Franklin Award 2008, The Lost Life (2009), which was shortlisted for both the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award and the ALS Gold Medal 2010, and Spirit of Progress (2011), which was longlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award, and A World of Other People (2013), which was shortlisted for the South Australian Premier’s Award 2014 and was co-winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2014. He was a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2015, and Forever Young (2015) was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2016 and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2016.
Steven Carroll lives in Melbourne with his partner and son.
Praise for A World of Other People
‘A World of Other People is a powerfully imagined, elegiac homage to love, heroism and poetry … an intimate private drama, set against the immense and tragic backdrop of European civilization tearing itself apart’
Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Judges, 2014
‘A fine, absorbing novel — darker than The Lost Life but equally eloquent and assured. Carroll’s recreation of a distant and now long-lost world is vivid and tactful’
Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald
Praise for The Time We Have Taken
‘Carroll’s novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration … a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives’
Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2008
‘The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them. The surface of Carroll’s writing is deceptively calm … Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud’
Michael McGirr, The Age
‘It is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its transcendent possibilities that makes this novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised’
Debra Adelaide, The Australian
Praise for The Gift of Speed
‘Carroll’s gift for evocative storytelling … had me captivated’
Australian Bookseller & Publisher
‘A novel of tender and harrowing melancholy’
Le Nouvel Observateur
‘Carroll’s a rare beast in that he writes with great affection and understanding about life in the suburbs … A lovely rites of passage novel that is oh so carefully crafted and captures the evanescence of time to perfection’
Jason Steger, The Age
‘Carroll’s writing is astonishingly assured’
James Bradley, Australian Book Review
Praise for The Art of the Engine Driver
‘Subtle, true and profoundly touching’
Le Monde
‘A veritable gem … a beautiful discovery’
Elle France
‘An exquisitely crafted journey of Australian suburban life … fresh and irresistible’
Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2002
‘a little masterpiece’
Hessische Allgemeine
Praise for The Lost Life
‘Carroll’s prose is limpid and assured … [a] poised and beautifully burnished work. Carroll’s control is masterly’
Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Carroll’s ability to turn an ordinary moment into something sacred makes this novel a profound exploration of human desire, endurance, maturity and regret’
Bookseller & Publisher
‘This novel will consolidate Steven Carroll’s reputation among Australia’s literati … Carroll is as much the literary ringmaster as novelist in The Lost Life, but remains as “rewardingly eclectic, intelligent and involving as ever”’
The Week
‘[a] brilliantly envisaged novel … few novels begin with such measured elegance’
The Sunday Tasmanian
‘its capacity to evoke a kind of sharp, sad nostalgia for an unlived past takes you by surprise. To enter the narrative is like entering into a slightly faded but exquisitely tinted photograph encased in gilded frame’
The Canberra Times
‘this is not so much a departure as an arrival … Carroll’s fiction is distinctive for the way his clean prose decelerates experience, puts aside the urgings of linear temporality, to reveal a richness that habitually evades us … his beautiful and poetically attentive novel retrieves a warm, beating heart from Eliot’s haunted, stark, magnificent work of art’
Australian Literary Review
‘Carroll’s prose has a sublime rhythmic quality … almost as if he has sung the words on the page’
Australian Boo
k Review
Praise for Forever Young
‘No Australian author has better evoked the sense of change, the ravages of time, the obligation to self as well as to others. Forever Young is on one level about nostalgia, without ever succumbing to it. There is pathos but no patronage in its chronicling of postwar suburban sprawl and the drift back to the inner city. You can leave the suburbs; you can even leave Australia; you can, in a word, leave home, but home will not leave you. At every turn this exquisitely crafted novel can widen our notion of what it is to be human, then, now and, possibly, later’
The Sydney Morning Herald
‘The title of this fine novel speaks ambivalently to a longing for lost youth, and to the desire to escape its sentimental claims’
Peter Pierce, The Australian
‘Carroll … transmutes the grey facts of daily life into light and luminous art’
Geordie Williamson, The Australian
‘Six novels that explore particular characters as they engage with a deep personal understanding of place, time, history, thought and sensation add up to a considerable achievement … Forever Young shows a writer at complete ease with a style that he has developed over a considerable period of time’
Brenda Walker, The Monthly
‘As a psychogeographer of postwar Melbourne, Carroll is always fascinating. He has a way of embedding living stories in the fabric of the city and then binding them together’
The Saturday Paper
‘A very fine and significant achievement’
Adelaide Advertiser
Also by Steven Carroll
Remember Me, Jimmy James
Momoko
The Love Song of Lucy McBride
The Art of the Engine Driver
The Gift of Speed
The Time We Have Taken
The Lost Life
Spirit of Progress
A World of Other People
Forever Young
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2017
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Steven Carroll 2017
The right of Steven Carroll to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN: 978 1 4607 5109 1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0572 8 (ebook)
Cover design by Hazel Lam, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images: Woman by Bettmann/Getty Images; The Dry Salvages by Philip Scalia/
Alamy Stock Photos; all other images by shutterstock.com
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