The Invisible Mile
-
- 9,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Based on a true event, New Zealand author Coventry's tense, dark debut novel is a powerful story of grim determination and one man's forlorn hope to conquer fear and pain in the world's most grueling bicycle race, the Tour de France. The unnamed narrator is an anonymous member of the 1928 Australian-New Zealand Ravat-Wonder cycling team, the first English-speaking peloton to race in the Tour de France. They are foreigners in a foreign land, facing 5,476 km of bad roads, mountains, cold, heat, illness, and injury. The narrator is 27 years old, a young man adrift amidst the ghosts of post-World War I Europe, questioning his purpose and abilities, searching but never finding any answers. Like his teammates, he is driven to compete, knowing he cannot win, just hoping to finish the race's last invisible mile. His voice is thoughtful and introspective as he tells of his doubts and fears, forcing his mind and body to endure extreme fatigue, hunger, thirst, sickness, and injury. Celia, a race fan who follows the race in a car and befriends the cyclist, is just as adrift as he is. Best are Coventry's vivid descriptions of cycling team tactics, the drugs and alcohol, the excitement of the watching crowds, and the bloody accidents and crashes of the 162 cyclists that began the race, only 42 finished.
