The Life to Come

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia when she was fourteen. Educated in Melbourne and Paris, Michelle has worked as a university tutor, an editor and a book reviewer. She is the award-winning author of The Rose Grower, The Hamilton Case, The Lost Dog and Questions of Travel, which received fourteen honours, including winning the 2013 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

‘A thought-provoking novel of both beauty and brains.’ Kirkus Reviews

‘The Life to Come is an intense reading experience, marked by a sense that the very culture that Western Civilisation needs to rescue itself from egotism and pettiness is itself suffocating. De Kretser’s honesty is often funny…but not always comfortable. Her powers of description and evocation are remarkable.’ Michael McGirr, The Sydney Morning Herald

‘The Life to Come cements Michelle de Krester’s place as a premier writer of Australian identity, not the mythologised version – of Anzacs, battlers, and bushrangers – but the globalised reality, our culture of cosmopolitan insulation and well-meaning tactlessness.’ Beejay Silcox, Australian Book Review

‘De Kretser is an ironist without peer in contemporary Australian writing. Her instincts are subversive, her scalpel well-honed. She exposes her characters’ vanities, only to turn our sense of their thoughtlessness and self-regard inside-out so that we might sympathise with their loneliness. Her powers of social observation are as acute as her awareness of the fictions we live by.’ James Ley, Sydney Review of Books