Theory & Practice

2025 Stella Prize Winner & Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2025

By: Michelle de Kretser

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Paperback | 29 October 2024

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23.3 x 15.3 x 2.0

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One of the most anticipated literary releases of the year, this gripping novel changes the game on what fiction can be and do.

'Thrillingly original.'- Sigrid Nunez

'One of the living masters of the art of fiction.'- Max Porter

'Michelle de Kretser, one of the best writers in the English language, has written her most brilliant book yet. It is, in short, a masterpiece.'- Neel Mukherjee

It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students-and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.

Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.

'In the midst of a late coming-of-age plot effervescent with romantic and intellectual misadventure, de Kretser considers memory-how we enshrine our cultural heroes and how we tell ourselves the stories of our own lives-with absolute rigor and perfect clarity. Structurally innovative and totally absorbing, this is a book that enlivens the reader to every kind of possibility. I savoured every word.' - Jennifer Croft, author of The Extinction of Irena Rey

'A hugely talented author.' Sarah Waters

'Michelle de Kretser is a genius-one of the best writers working today. She is startlingly, uncannily good at naming and facing what is most difficult and precious about our lives. Theory & Practice is a wonder, a brilliant book that reinvents itself again and again, stretching the boundaries of the novel to show the ways in which ideas and ideals are folded into our days, as well as the times when our choices fail to meet them. There's no writer I'd rather read.' V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Women's Prize for Fiction and Carol Shields Prize award-winning Brotherless Night

About the Author

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka. She lives in Warrane/Sydney on unceded Gadigal land. An honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney, she has won several awards for her fiction. Theory & Practice is her seventh novel.

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