Cirrus@Austlit

'“Who will write the history of tears?” The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel returns to this question from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1977). Named once fleetingly, she is a writer, glancing back to growing up in Sri Lanka before her family migrated to Sydney, then reflecting on living in Melbourne to write a thesis on Virginia Woolf. Though her Sydney boyfriend has betrayed her, desire remains as central to her attention as the question of what a novel can do.' (Introduction)