num_pages: 384
description: Set in Australia France and Sri Lanka The Life to Come is about the stories we tell and dont 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 an Australian writer who longs for the success of her novelist teacher and eventually comes to fear that she missed everything important. In Paris 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 and cant commit to his trusting girlfriend Cassie. Sri Lankan Christabel who is generously offered a passage to Sydney by Bunty an old acquaintance 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 wisdomexhilaratingly contemporary with the feel of a classic.
language: English
title: The Life to Come
publisher: Allen & Unwin