THE AMATEUR SCIENCE OF LOVE

We're reading Colin's suicide note, though 'note' is probably too diminutive a word for this story. A man diminished, a man brought to the edge by the turns his life has taken and the choices he's made that find him here, on his typewriter, at a little wooden desk, in a small room, in a house in rural Australia, with a woman he does not love, and cannot trust.

But we start at the beginning with twenty-one-year-old Colin and his dreams of escaping his parents' New Zealand farm for fame and fortune in the form of a grand stage career. He makes it as far as London and a disastrous RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) audition before meeting Tilda—beautiful Tilda, older, an artist—who brings his future with her. A breathless romance, a love like neither has felt before, leads to a new home in a grand, decaying former bank in Scintilla, hours from Melbourne. They are beginning to build a life together.

But there are cracks in the foundation. And what started so beautifully eventually degenerates into misery and betrayal.

This is a love story, told from passionate and expectant beginning to bitter and hate-filled end. It's brutally honest, painfully intimate and emotionally devastating.

Craig Sherborne's 2005 memoir, 'Hoi Polloi', was shortlisted for both the Queensland and Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. The follow-up, 'Muck', won the Queensland Literary Award for Non-fiction in 2008. Both titles were published in the UK by Old Street and 'Muck' was published by WW Norton in the US. Sherborne is a former Wal Cherry Play of the Year award-winner. He has also written two volumes of poetry and a verse-drama called 'Look at Everything Twice for Me'. Sherborne's journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia's leading literary journals and anthologies.