Love & Virtue

Author(s): Diana Reid

Contemporary | Australian authors | Team favourites

ABIA 2022 Literary Fiction Book of the Year. Whenever I say I was at university with Eve, people ask me what she was like, sceptical perhaps that she could have always been as whole and self-assured as she now appears. To which I say something like: 'People are infinitely complex.' But I say it in such a way--so pregnant with misanthropy--that it's obvious I hate her. Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular - the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week - a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power. Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the colleges' mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are. Written with a strikingly contemporary voice that is both wickedly clever and incisive, issues of consent, class and institutional privilege, and feminism become provocations for enduring philosophical questions we face today. PRAISE FOR LOVE & VIRTUE 'Diana Reid will be called the new Sally Rooney - you're certain of it by the end of page one. By the end of this real, raw and startling novel, you know Reid is the talent to whom every smart young novelist who follows her will be compared - or hope to be.' Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss  

KERRYS REVIEW - Dont be fooled by the cover.  Be prepared to end up with a frustrating anger as this sensational debut novel guides us through the tales of university life and the sense of entitlement men feel they have. My mind takes me to the Canberra bubble that is our Australian parliament today and where these private school boys end up in their careers. An awful betrayal of female friendship and the long lasting scars that it can inflict. One of my best reads for 2021.


 


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781761150111
  • : Ultimo Press
  • : Ultimo Press
  • : August 2021
  • : {"length"=>["9.213"], "width"=>["6.024"], "units"=>["Inches"]}
  • : November 2022
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Diana Reid
  • : Trade Paperback
  • : English
  • : very good