The Lost Life

Two young lovers, Catherine and Jonathan, have trespassed into the rose garden of an abandoned gracious home in the English countryside. Hearing people coming, they hide, and witness the celebrated poet, T.S. (‘Tom’) Eliot, and his close friend, Emily Hale, enter the rose garden and bury a small tobacco tin together.

Tom and Emily knew each other in America in their youth; now middle-aged, they have come together again. But Tom is married, and his wife has no intention of letting him go. Is what binds Tom and Emily stronger than simple nostalgia and a desire to escape their problems in the ‘real’ world?

In the enclosed world of an English village one autumn, their story becomes entwined with Catherine and Jonathan, who are young, certain in their new-found love, and each full of promise.

This is a moving, beautifully written novel of second chances and the luminous experience of first love from one of Australia’s finest writers.

‘a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised’ The Australian on The Time We Have Taken.

Steven Carroll went to La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in bands in the 1970s. After leaving the music scene he wrote plays and became theatre critic for the Sunday Age. He is the author of the The Gift of Speed and The Art of the Engine Driver, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and The Time We Have Taken, for which he won the 2008 Miles Franklin Award and also the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the South-East Asia and South Pacific region. He lives in Melbourne with his partner and son. England, September 1934.

Readings.com.au: The Lost Life

The Lost Life