The Life to Come

The Life to Come
ISBN: 9781760296568
Publication Date: 1 October 2017

Winner of the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize

Set in Sydney, Paris and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is a mesmerising novel about the stories we tell and don't tell ourselves as individuals, as societies and as nations. It feels at once firmly classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.

Pippa is a writer who longs for success. Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time. Driven by riveting stories and unforgettable characters, here is a dazzling meditation on intimacy, loneliness and our flawed perception of other people.

Profoundly moving as well as bitingly funny, The Life to Come reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform, distort and undo the present. This extraordinary novel by Miles Franklin-winning author Michelle de Kretser will strike to your soul.

Review by Ben Hunter

We book fanatics talk excessively about the power of fiction to open our eyes to the world we live in - to inspire that change in our lives that self-help gurus keep telling us about. Read, we say. Read and become a better human. This is an aphorism I've willingly accepted, but it's been months, perhaps even years, since I've felt the transformation happen in such an immediate and indisputable way.

Since reading The Life to Come I've started to see Sydney in a whole new light. The city is no longer just a destination for me, it's also a waypoint. The poky and quirky suburbs I inhabit are not just made up of homes, roads and railway stations, but can now be seen as a kind of strange dream, something less tangible than I once thought. As a writer...