Love & Virtue

Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist

Winner of the ABIA Book of the Year Award

Winner of the ABIA Award for Literary Fiction of the Year

Winner ABA Booksellers Choice Award for Fiction

Winner of the MUD Literary Prize

Shortlisted for The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction

Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year for Fiction

Shortlisted Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction

Shortlisted ABIA Matt Richell Award New Writer of the Year

‘Set to be one of the year’s most talked about books’ – Vogue Australia

‘A great read that will become an Australian classic’ – Sydney Morning Herald

‘An absolute cracker, Love & Virtue lobs right into the current moment with a clarifying light. I hope EVERYONE reads this book.’ – Helen Garner, bestselling and award-winning author of The First Stone and The Spare Room

‘One of the best novels I have read this year ... it’s clever, pacy and wonderfully thoughtful. Read it!’ – Zara McDonald, Shameless Podcast

Sex. Power. Consent.

Whenever I say I was at university with Eve, people ask me what she was like, sceptical perhaps that she could have always been as whole and self-assured as she now appears. To which I say something like: ‘People are infinitely complex.’ But I say it in such a way—so pregnant with misanthropy—that it’s obvious I hate her.

Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular – the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week – a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.

Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the college's mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are.

Written with a strikingly contemporary voice that is both wickedly clever and incisive, issues of consent, class and institutional privilege, and feminism become provocations for enduring philosophical questions we face today.

Praise for Love & Virtue

‘Diana Reid will be called the new Sally Rooney – you’re certain of it by the end of page one. By the end of this real, raw and startling novel, you know Reid is the talent to whom every smart young novelist who follows her will be compared – or hope to be.’ – Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss

‘Love & Virtue captures the near-erotic thrill of being a young woman, alone and adrift, who finds, in another young woman, an intellectual equal ... Like Elena and Lila in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a touchstone for Reid, their spark feels charged, given to exploding.’ – Sydney Morning Herald

‘Love & Virtue is an accomplished novel – by turns funny and furious, and full of the plangent longing and confusion of early adulthood.’ – The Saturday Paper

‘It is not enough to say Love & Virtue heralds the arrival of a new literary talent: Reid is intensely incisive and brilliant.’ – Sarah Schmidt, author of See What I Have Done

‘Reid’s prose interrogates everything we think we know about love. Heartfelt and unputdownable, this is a remarkably self-assured debut.’ – Victoria Hannan, author of Kokomo

‘A fierce new voice at just the right moment, shining a light on consent and class with clarity and grace.’ – Inga Simpson, author of Where the Trees Were and Understory