The Life to Come
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award
Shortlisted for the Stella Prize
Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
“For a novel concerned with dislocation, there's a lot of grounding humor in The Life to Come. Most of it comes at the expense of Pippa and her ilk, but de Kretser's observations are so spot on, you'll forgive her even as you cringe.”—Amelia Lester, New York Times Book Review
Set in Australia, France, and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is about the stories we tell and don’t tell ourselves as individuals, as societies, and as nations. Driven by a vivid cast of characters, it explores necessary emigration, the art of fiction, and ethnic and class conflict.
Pippa is a writer who longs for success and eventually comes to fear that she “missed everything important.” 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. Sri Lankan Christabel endures her dull job and envisions a brighter future that “rose, glittered, and sank back,” while she neglects the love close at hand.
The stand–alone yet connected worlds of The Life to Come offer meditations on intimacy, loneliness, and our flawed perception of reality. Enormously moving, gorgeously observant of physical detail, and often very funny, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform and distort the present. It is teeming with life and earned wisdom—exhilaratingly contemporary, with the feel of a classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
De Kretser's sprawling follow-up to her novella Springtime features many different lives converging and diverging across decades and continents. In Sydney, Pippa wants to make her mark on Australian fiction, while her former professor, George, distances himself from his cult following the success of his own books. A few streets away, Cassie falls for Ash, mesmerized by his mysterious boyhood in Sri Lanka. In Paris, Celeste works as a translator while reckoning with her complicated history with the city and the lover she rearranges her life for. And all the while, over many decades, Sri Lankan Christabel and her childhood friend Bunty build a quiet life together in Australia after reconnecting as adults. While each section can stand alone, together they create a joyful and mournful meditation on the endless small pleasures and complications of life: the difficulties of immigration, the logistics of infidelity, the creativity and insight born of jealousy and spite. In de Kretser's sure-footed and often surprising prose, life is rendered as something that's "tedious yet require concentration, like a standard-issue dream."
