Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight

From one of our finest writers—winner of the Miles Franklin, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Prime Minister's Literary Award—comes a wistful and emotional story that imagines a happier ending for the mercurial and complicated Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the first wife of the great poet, TS Eliot.

London, June 1940. Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the mercurial wife of celebrated poet T.S. Eliot, is about to effect a daring escape from Northumberland House, the private asylum where she has been held for the past three years. There is an old law, Vivienne has been told, that if you can break out of an asylum and stay free for thirty days, 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 this novel, Steven Carroll completes his critically acclaimed, award-winning, and much-loved Eliot Quartet. Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight is a delicate dance between what was and what might have been, which imagines a wholly different and entirely satisfying ending to Vivienne's story. This is an absorbing, 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.

Australian Book Review: 'Carroll's prose has a sublime rhythmic quality...almost as if he has sung the words on the page.'

Adelaide Advertiser: 'As always with Carroll, it is...the richness of ideas, the allusive, measured prose...that captivate the reader.'