Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight by Steven Carroll
About Steven Carroll
Steven Carroll is the multi-award winning author of twelve novels including A World of Other People (2013) , which was the joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and The Time We Have Taken (2007), which was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the SE Asia and Pacific Region and the Miles Franklin Award in 2008. Forever Young (2015) was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2016. A New England Affair (2017) was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 2018 and The Year of the Beast (2019) was longlisted for the 2020 Voss Literary Prize. His most recent novel is O (2021).
Steven lives in Melbourne with his partner, the author Fiona Capp, and their son.
A Quote from Steven Carroll
“Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, is set in another country and another time with no Australian characters, which may make it seem almost resolutely irrelevant. But being listed for this prestigious prize reassures me that it may have resonance in the here and now.”
About Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight
London, June 1940. With help from friends, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the wife of celebrated poet TS Eliot, is about to effect a daring escape from Northumberland House, the private insane asylum where she has been held for the past four years. Her family, and most particularly her husband, think she’s insane – and maybe she has been, in the past, Vivienne thinks, mad with love, that is, but she is starting to finally feel like herself again.
There is an old law, Vivienne has been told, that if a person can break out of an asylum and stay free for thirty days, proving they can look after themselves, they can’t make you go back. But closing in on Vivienne is the young Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, a man with a hidden past of his own, who has orders to track her down…
With Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, Steven Carroll completes his critically acclaimed, award-winning and much-loved Eliot Quartet. This novel is a poignant, deeply felt and intensely moving novel of beginnings, endings and reinvention, about the aftermath of a marriage and the reassembling of a broken woman.
