God of Speed by Luke Davies

The new novel from one of Australia's most exciting literary talents is a vividly imagined and riveting portrait of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary characters - aviator, film-maker, and billionaire, Howard Hughes.

I will fly at last. I will unfold my wings. I will unpack my head. I will step back outside. One day I may even make love again. But one thing at a time. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Film mogul, aviator, addict, inventor, visionary, recluse, serial womanizer, political meddler: Howard Hughes was one of the strangest and most significant figures of the twentieth century. His obsessive-compulsive disorder would end up crippling and isolating him; in the end he self-medicated his way into oblivion.

It's a summer night in 1973, and holed up in his hotel penthouse in London, Hughes can't sleep. Tomorrow he takes control of an airplane for the first time in more than fifteen years. As the reclusive, drug-addled billionaire waits for the dawn, the shape and preoccupations of the times emerge from his ruined psyche; a world of oil, flight, money, movies, drugs, sex, power, greed, fear, yearning America.

Blackly funny, muscular and rhythmic, transcendent and debauched, God of Speed is a fever dream, a giant and extraordinary leap of the imagination into the fractured mind of a man who was both great, and greatly fallen.

(From Publisher).

Luke Davies is the author of two novels, Isabelle the Navigator and the cult bestseller Candy, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 1998 and has since been published in Britain, the United States and translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew and French. A film version, starring Heath Ledger, was released in 2006 and won the AFI for Best Adapted Screenplay. Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry in 2004. He has published five books of poetry, including Running With Light which was the winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2000, and Totem, which won the 2004 Age Book of the Year winner.