The Art of the Engine Driver

As a great steam train pulls out of Spencer Street Station on the run to Sydney, Vic, Rita and their son Michael set off on foot for an engagement party. Their neighbour George Bedser, a Liverpool shipbuilder with no family in Australia, is celebrating his daughter Patsy's engagement and has asked everyone in the street. Vic drives engines and longs to equal his hero Paddy Ryan, whose trains glide without a jolt. As the evening goes on, told through description and inner voices, the neighbours' pasts come out, among them a bully's, a drunk's and a discontented girl's, and the old world collides with the new: steam with diesel, the country with the town.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

Australia

First published

2001

Author's age

52 when first published

ISBN

9780732270575 (Flamingo, Australia)

9780099537274 (Windmill, United Kingdom)

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