The Amateur Science of Love

They say we fall in love. But really we fall in sickness. I lost appetite for food in those two nights with Tilda. My stomach was sunken in its wishbone cavity. Me, I was never sick, but I was sick now, the strangest sickness that made my eyes gleam green with excellent health. They had shiny white edges. My cheeks were glossed in a fresh oil of pink.

Colin dreams of escaping his parents’ New Zealand farm for a grand stage career. He makes it to London and a disastrous audition before meeting Tilda—beautiful Tilda, older, an artist—who brings his future with her.

A heady romance leads to a new home in a decaying former bank in a small town hours from Melbourne. They are building a life together—but there are cracks in the foundation.

This is a love story, told from passionate beginning to spectacular end. It is intimate and honest, blackly funny and emotionally devastating.

The Amateur Science of Love featured on the ABC Radio National’s Book Reading program. Listen to the book being read aloud here.

Listen to Craig reading from and talking about The Amateur Science of Love on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.

Read the Age interview.

Praise for The Amateur Science of Love:

All women with lingering illusions about the way men think should read this fast-moving, sharply focused, fantasy-shattering little thunderclap of a book.

Helen Garner

I can’t fault this book — the characters are solid and believable, the storyline unpredictable and the rural Australian imagery vivid. The science of love and lust in its many forms is played out convincingly through Colin and Tilda and is not told in an overly soppy or trite way — it’s tangible and that’s what works so well.

Australian Bookseller & Publisher

Sherborne excels at taking subject matter that has been written about a million times before and making the reader feel as though they are experiencing it for the first time…This is a frank, fun and fearless romantic tale that readers are also bound to fall in love with. ****

Good Reading

Intelligent and unusual…a perceptive study of self-absorption, of cruelty that chooses not to face itself, the discerning psychological portrait of a numbed heart and conscience.

Weekend Australian

I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Craig, and taking in his ideas about how important story telling is to our culture. This is a fascinating interview, encompassing so much about what it is to write, and the methods of writing – and what it is to live. Listen to interview.

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