Practice
A Novel
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Named a Slate Top 10 Book of the Year
An NPR and Literary Hub Best Book of the Year
An astonishing first novel about a day in the life of a young student who experiences her thoughts, fantasies, and wishes as she writes about—or tries to write about—Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Six o’clock in the morning, Sunday, at the worn-out end of January.
In a small room, cold and dim and quiet, an undergraduate student works on an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Annabel has a meticulously planned routine for her day—work, yoga, meditation, long walks— but finds it repeatedly thrown off course. Despite her efforts, she cannot stop her thoughts from slipping off their intended track into the shadows of elaborate erotic fantasies.
As the essay’s deadline looms, so too does the irrepressible presence of other people: Annabel’s boyfriend, Rich, keen to come visit her; her family and friends who demand her attention; and darker crises, obliquely glimpsed, all threatening to disturb the much-cherished quiet in her mind.
Exquisitely crafted, wryly comic, and completely original, Rosalind Brown’s Practice is a novel about the life of the mind and the life of the body, about the repercussions of a rigid routine and the deep pleasures of literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown's sensuous and erudite debut follows a single day in the life of an Oxford student as she brainstorms an essay about Shakespeare's sonnets. Annabel has yet to decide on her theme, and has risen early to "simply sit" with the text—as a tutor once advised her to do when faced with an assignment. Despite her desire to focus, she can't. Instead, she drinks tea, walks in the park, does yoga, and fantasizes about sex. Amid Annabel's reveries, Brown inserts florid depictions of mundane matters (Annabel "sits on the toilet to piss. Empties herself into calmness"). Low-stakes tension simmers over whether Annabel will allow her older boyfriend to visit her on campus, while news of a friend's hospitalization for anorexia provokes guilty feelings. When Annabel does turn her mind to the sonnets, Brown's prose soars ("Could an essay smile with all the smiles she has for the Sonnets: the sad smile of sympathy, the wry smile sharing in his self-mockery... the soft sunlit smile when he offers an image of great beauty"). Lovers of the written word will be impressed.
