The Amateur Science of Love

Winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature, Best Writing Award 2012 and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, 2011.  


The Amateur Science of Love is the debut novel by Craig Sherborne, author of the acclaimed memoirs Hoi Polloi and Muck.


Colin dreams of escaping his parents' farm for a grand stage career. He makes it to London and a disastrous audition before meeting Tilda. 


Tilda is beautiful, older, an artist and she brings his future with her. A heady romance leads to a small town in country Victoria and a new home in a decaying former bank. They are building a life together, but there are cracks in the foundation. 


This is a love story, told from passionate beginning to spectacular end. It is intimate and honest, blackly funny and emotionally devastating.  


Craig Sherborne’s Hoi Polloi was shortlisted for the Queensland and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The follow-up, Muck, won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Sherborne has also written two volumes of poetry and won the Wal Cherry Play of the Year award, and his journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies. 


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'All women with lingering illusions about the way men think should read this fast-moving, sharply focused, fantasy-shattering little thunderclap of a book.' Helen Garner


'I can’t fault this book — the characters are solid and believable, the storyline unpredictable and the rural Australian imagery vivid. The science of love and lust in its many forms is played out convincingly through Colin and Tilda and is not told in an overly soppy or trite way — it’s tangible and that’s what works so well.' Australian Bookseller & Publisher 


'Sherborne excels at taking subject matter that has been written about a million times before and making the reader feel as though they are experiencing it for the first time…This is a frank, fun and fearless romantic tale that readers are also bound to fall in love with.' **** Good Reading 


'Intelligent and unusual…a perceptive study of self-absorption, of cruelty that chooses not to face itself, the discerning psychological portrait of a numbed heart and conscience.' Weekend Australian