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Christian Dittus
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English

THE INVISIBLE MILE

David Coventry

The 1928 Ravat-Wonder team from New Zealand and Australia were the first English-speaking team to ride the Tour de France. From June through July they faced one of toughest in the race's history: 5,476 kilometres of unsealed roads on heavy, fixed-wheel bikes. They rode in darkness through mountains with no light and brakes like glass. They weren't expected to finish, but stadiums filled with Frenchmen eager to call their names.

THE INVISIBLE MILE is a powerful re-imagining of the tour from inside the peloton, where the test of endurance, for one young New Zealander, becomes a psychological journey into the chaos of the War a decade earlier. Riding on the alternating highs of cocaine and opium, victory and defeat, the rider's mind is increasingly fixed on his encounter with his family's past. As he nears the battlefields of the north and his last, invisible mile, the trauma of exertion and disputed guilt cast strange shadows on his story, and onlookers congregate about him waiting for revelation.

David Coventry is forty five, and has only been writing for the last six years. He received his MFA in 2010 from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. THE INVISIBLE MILE was published in New Zealand by Victoria University Press (the NZ publisher of Eleanor Catton) on June 11th of this year to reviews calling the book "brilliant", "a tour de force", an "important and impressive debut", "a dream to read" and to a first-week position at #2 on the NZ bestseller list.

DIE UNSICHTBARE MEILE
Deutsch von Volker Oldenburg
[HC Insel 05/17; TB Insel 06/19]]
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Published 2015-06-01 by Victoria University Press

Comments

UK: Picador; NL: Atlas Contact

The Invisible Mile is a dream to read, in all senses of the word. It's a trance like account of the 1928 Tour de France . The writing is fierce, a bravura mix of narcissism, masochism and lyricism grounded in the honesty of the unnamed rider's journey into his self and the dawning realisation that the race has become a grand metaphor for the trauma of World War I.

Spain: Seix Barral; USA: Europa; Israel: Yediot; Denmark: Rosinante;

a truly extraordinary first novel

The Invisible Mile is an important and impressive debut

Winner of the 2016 Ockham New Zealand prize for Best First Novel