Life After Truth
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  • Published: 3 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9781760895365
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $32.99

Life After Truth

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
3 Nov 2020
EBook
3 Nov 2020
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At their fifteen-year reunion, a group of Harvard graduates – labouring with early middle age, marriage and children, unrealised aspirations and a depressing political climate – rekindle old loves and old resentments.

Fifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they’ve wasted their youthful opportunities. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won’t share what is haunting her. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife’s radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one.
The soul searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick – senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US president – turns up dead.
Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love – and to ourselves . . .
  • Published: 3 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9781760895365
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Ceridwen Dovey

Ceridwen Dovey is a writer based in Sydney. She’s the author of several acclaimed works of fiction (Blood Kin, Only the Animals, In the Garden of the Fugitives, Life After Truth, Once More With Feeling) and non-fiction (On J.M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers and Inner Worlds Outer Spaces: The Working Lives of Others). Her non-fiction essays have been published by newyorker.com, the Smithsonian Magazine, WIRED, Vogue, the Monthly and Alexander, among many others. She’s the recipient of an Australian Museum Eureka Award, and the 2020 & 2021 UNSW Press Bragg Prize for science writing. Her latest book is Mothertongues, a work of literary fiction co-authored with Eliza Bell, and including original songs by Australian songwriter Keppie Coutts.

portrait photo of Ceridwen Dovey

Also by Ceridwen Dovey

Only the Astronauts
Mothertongues
Inner Worlds Outer Spaces
In the Garden of the Fugitives
Blood Kin
Only the Animals
See all

Praise for Life After Truth

A wonderful writer of thoughtful, provocative, compelling fiction.

Liane Moriarty

This sublime gem of a novel not only explores friendship and its capacity to withstand and adapt to the vagaries inflicted by love, parenthood and ageing, but also considers its role in determining the people we become. Clever, thoughtful and funny, I gulped it down and did not want it to end. If you have not already read Ceridwen Dovey, do so now.

Hannah Kent

An addictive, page-turning murder mystery.

Jessica Montague, Vogue Australia

The college reunion may be a much-visited fictional terrain, but in Ceridwen Dovey’s articulate and penetrating novel it becomes a place where we discover that the lies we keep from others are often the lies we tell ourselves. This is a canny journey into that corner of the human condition where disappointment defines the horizon.

Douglas Kennedy

Awards & recognition

Sisters in Crime Davitt Award

Longlisted  •  2021  •  Fiction

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Life After Truth book club notes

These friends think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love...

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