'"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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Diana Reid resists an easy delivery of certainties in her debut novel Love and Virtue. Tracking the fallout from an incident that may or may not have been sexual assault, Reid avoids didacticism as she examines power, agency and class privilege at a Sydney university and issues a provocation to the reader: discern for yourself, as narrator Michaela must, ‘the distinction between being hurt and being wronged’.' (Introduction)
'University campus culture was fresh for Diana Reid when she began writing Love & Virtue. She had recently graduated from The University of Sydney in early 2020 when Covid kyboshed her plans to tour with a musical theatre production she’d co-written. So instead she sat down to pen her debut, which she describes as an ‘Australian campus novel’.' (Introduction)
'Peeling back the layers of consent and morality.'
'Reid’s debut is a multilayered page-turner on power, unrequited love and campus rape culture, wrapped in a coming-of-age narrative'
'University campus culture was fresh for Diana Reid when she began writing Love & Virtue. She had recently graduated from The University of Sydney in early 2020 when Covid kyboshed her plans to tour with a musical theatre production she’d co-written. So instead she sat down to pen her debut, which she describes as an ‘Australian campus novel’.' (Introduction)
'Diana Reid resists an easy delivery of certainties in her debut novel Love and Virtue. Tracking the fallout from an incident that may or may not have been sexual assault, Reid avoids didacticism as she examines power, agency and class privilege at a Sydney university and issues a provocation to the reader: discern for yourself, as narrator Michaela must, ‘the distinction between being hurt and being wronged’.' (Introduction)
