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 enjoy, 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.


‘Thrillingly original.' SIGRID NUNEZ, author of The Vulnerables

‘Theory & Practice blazes with intelligence, passion and wit. I devoured it, greedily, in a single glorious sitting.' SARAH WATERS

‘One of the living masters of the art of fiction.' MAX PORTER

‘Michelle de Krestser, one of the best writers in the English language, has written her most brilliant book yet. It is, in short, a masterpiece.' NEEL MUKHERJEE

‘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