Practice

Six o’clock in the morning, Sunday, at the worn-out end of January. In a small room in an Oxford college, cold and dim and full of quiet, an undergraduate student works on an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel has a meticulously planned routine for her day – work, yoga, meditation, long walks; no apples after meals, no coffee on an empty stomach – but finds it repeatedly thrown off course. Exquisitely crafted, wryly comic and completely original, ‘Practice’ is a novel about the life of the mind and the life of the body, about the repercussions of a rigid routine and the deep pleasures of literature.