The Life To Come

Set in Australia, France, & Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is about the stories we tell & don’t tell ourselves as individuals, as societies, & as nations. Driven by a vivid cast of characters, it explores necessary emigration, the art of fiction, & ethnic & class conflict. 

Pippa is an Australian writer who longs for the success of her novelist teacher & 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 & can’t 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 & envisions a brighter future that “rose, glittered, & 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, & our flawed perception of reality. Enormously moving, gorgeously observant of physical detail, & often very funny, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser reveals how the shadows cast by both the past & the future can transform & distort the present. It is teeming with life & earned wisdom—exhilaratingly contemporary, with the feel of a classic.

"[The Life to Come] has five overlapping stories which, while being character-driven, reflect a particular concern with history & place. . . . Michelle de Kretser is a writer of unsentimental humanity." —The Spectator

"A thought-provoking novel of both beauty & brains." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)