Search results for ""Author David Coventry""

'A raw and raging celebration of music . . . astounding.' Megan Bradbury'Funny, filthy, erudite, and rude.' Carl Shuker'A magnificent novel.' Alan McMonagleDuring their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band’s four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, traversing time and investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, violence and revelling in transcendence through the act of art.With decades passed and compelled by his wife’s failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty.Dance Prone is a novel of music, ritual and love. It is live, tense and corporeal. Full of closely observed details of indie-rock, of punk infused performance, the road and the players’ relationship to violence, hate and peace. Set during both the post-punk period and the present day, Dance Prone was born out of a love of the underground and indie rock scenes of the 1980s, a fascination for their role in the cultural apparatus of memory, social decay and its reconstruction.

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David Coventry was born in 1969 in New Zealand, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Laura Southgate. Published in over fifteen counties, Coventry's debut, The Invisible Mile, was hailed in the New York Times as a gorgeous . . . philosophical action-adventure', was book of the week in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was described in his home country as one of the most gruelling novels about sport ever written', one which immediately places David Coventry among the elite of New Zealand authors.' He received his MA in 2010 from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington where he is currently completing a PhD.

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Based on a true story The Invisible Mile tells the poignant story of five Australian and New Zealand cyclists who in 1928 formed the first English-speaking team to ride in the Tour de France. They were gallant, under-resourced and badly outnumbered but taken deep to the heart by the French nation. The novel describes in a wonderful poetic and visceral voice what it was like to ride in this race (the chaos, danger and rivalries), the extraordinary lengths to which the riders pushed themselves, suffering horrific injuries, riding through the night in pitch dark, and the ways they staved off the pain, through camaraderie, through sexual conquest, through drink, and through drugs (cocaine for energy, opium for pain).Added to the team is the fictional narrator who is cycling towards his demons in a northern France still scarred by the First World War. His brother was a fighter pilot damaged by his experiences in France, his sister has died, and this self-imposed test of endurance is slowly and painfully bringing him to his final, invisible mile where memory eventually comes to collide with the past

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