An Uncertain Grace

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Description

University lecturer Caspar receives a gift from his former student, Liv: a memory stick containing a virtual narrative. The virtual reality immerses him in the experience of their past sexual relationship, but this time from Liv's perspective. Caspar will realise what was an erotic interlude for him was vastly different for her.

Reviews

'One of Australia's most accomplished sex writers.' Books+Publishing 'It's a rare book that seems to drift like smoke away from the printed page to rewrite the physical world...[Kneen] wants us to strip naked and be transformed.' Melbourne Review of Books 'Haunting and wonderful.' My Cup and Chaucer 'Innovative and provocative...a virtual reality suit, sex, life, and the technological postponement of death.' Australian 'An Uncertain Grace is a highly provocative read that masterfully offers thoughtful speculation on the future of technology, memory and sexuality.' Books+Publishing 'This novel questions what it will mean to be human when we are able to be more than human-to be plural, genderless, or living the experiences of someone else through a digital narrative. With An Uncertain Grace, Kneen has given us something that is at once intensely affecting, entertaining, and hugely fascinating.' Readings 'Folding sensitive threads of erotica into mind-bending speculative fiction, Krissy Kneen's latest novel is an ambitious genre hybrid that addresses both morality and mortality from unique vantage points...She proceeds with sensitivity, sincerity and, most of all, curiosity...With its page-turning clarity, her writing is as compassionate and empowering as it is edgy and provocative. In the end, her characters are striving for the same things that any of us are.' Australian 'Such fantastical feats of Kneen's fertile imagination are not only bedded in a convincing future reality of extreme weather and drastically diminished species but blessed with engagingly lively and varied characters. Their circumstances, typified by the unusual fluidity of the personal pronouns, are often deeply and inventively strange, yet utterly convincing.' SA Weekend 'Highly unusual, very ambitious...but I think Krissy Kneen achieves it.' Radio New Zealand Radio New Zealand 'Krissy Kneen is a writer you may not hear mentioned constantly, but she's one of Australia's most gifted storytellers. Unflinchingly willing to explore the darker hearts and desires, she's an often confronting Australian erotica writer with a knack for bypassing the standard titillating fare to get to the heart of human wanting...A reasoned, emotive, and highly compelling exploration of what it means to be human, and the humanity of love, desire, and sex.' Hush Hush Biz 'A story in which science offers creepy solutions for unmanageable problems. This book requires a ghost-story warning: it will unsettle...A beautiful, dark read.' Listener 'This is speculative fiction that twines science fiction with erotica with philosophical questions of gender and sex, but the scope of Kneen's ambition and talent makes any such description seem terribly reductive...Kneen's imaginative leap towards a transhuman world is endlessly curious and inventive, provocative and inspiring.' Sydney Morning Herald 'One of the most radical and insightful writers working in Australian letters today...Just read this. You won't regret it.' Overland

Author Bio

Krissy Kneen is the award winning author of the memoir Affection, the novels Steeplechase, Triptych, The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine and An Uncertain Grace, and the Thomas Shapcott Award-winning poetry collection Eating My Grandmother. She has written and directed broadcast documentaries for SBS and ABC television.