WINNER OF THE STELLA PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025’The most thrilling fiction of the year … an absolute triumph’ Catherine Taylor, Financial Times’A genre-busting inquiry into life and art, youth and Virginia Woolf’ Guardian, Books to Look Forward to 2025’I loved Theory & Practice … raw, funny, truthful, youthful’ Tessa Hadley’Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book’ Ali SmithIt’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, a dismaying discovery throws her work on ‘the Woolfmother’ 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.