David Coventry

David Coventry

A true life tale of the first Antipodean Tour de France team.

David Coventry lives in Wellington, New Zealand with his partner and his cat. He received an MA from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in 2010. It was when working as a researcher at the Film Archive that he first came across the subject of his debut novel, The Invisible Mile.

The Invisible Mile is the fictionalised account of the gruelling journey of the first English-speaking team to ride in the Tour de France. In 1928, the under-resourced team of Australians and Kiwis faced what seemed like an impossible challenge. Pushing themselves to extreme lengths, encountering punishingly tough conditions and painful injuries along the way, the team captured the hearts of the French people. For the fictional narrator of the novel, the ride is a particularly difficult test of psychological endurance as he is transported back to the chaos of war a decade earlier.

Already a bestseller in New Zealand, The Invisible Mile is an incredible moving debut novel which draws the reader right into the heart of the peloton.