WINNER, STELLA PRIZE, 2025
SHORTLISTED, THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2025
SHORTLISTED, VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD, FICTION, 2025


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

'Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory and Practice a lightning strike of a book.' Ali Smith

'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

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

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.

PRAISE-

'Thrillingly original.' Sigrid Nunez

'I loved it...raw, funny, truthful, youthful' Tessa Hadley

'Startlingly intelligent and stylish.' Jasmine Vojdani, New York Magazine

'Brilliant and mesmerising.' Gleaner

'Perfect for a summer read, but also with a timeless appeal.' Good Weekend

'Utterly absorbing.' Felicity Plunkett, Saturday Paper

'Ambitious and dazzling ' Men Yiman, Big Issue

'I've read it twice...The more you look at it, the more it offers you.' Kate Evans, ABC News

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

'A brilliant account of what it means to be a feminist and wrestling with universal emotions that cannot be denied. It's a slim book, something you can finish in one glorious and insightful sitting.' Women's Agenda

'A thought-provoking narrative on desire, shame and moral complexities.' Harper's Bazaar

'De Kretser perceptively evokes how maternal figures, both birthright and adoptive, maintain a hold on us, despite our attempts to distance ourselves...A form-melding book contending with colonialism, the disharmony that can arise between our purported ideals and how we live, the depths of jealousy and shame, and motherhood and the maternal figures who shape us...An inquiry into what fiction can look like and what it can achieve.' Jack Callil, Guardian

'Sharp-witted and mesmerising...The narrator's clever political insights and beautiful depictions of art and literature offer readers a view into a captivating mind. De Kretser is at the top of her game.' Publishers Weekly (starred review)