Issue Details:First known date:20112011In the SMH (30-31 July 2011), Carroll says, in relation to the inspiration for Spirit of Progress: 'I realised that it could provide the basis for a prequel to the Glenroy trilogy...'
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.' (Publisher's blurb)
Notes
Prequel to The Art of the Engine Driver, the first book in the Glenroy Trilogy.
