4.5 stars

“Time. Something odd has happened to it. It has taken on physical form. Time rubs up against me like an invisible film, like Glad Wrap but the whole roll of it goes on and on forever. There is so much plastic wrap stretching out behind me, and in front of me, an age of it. I feel like I am trapped under an invisible film, staring out, perfectly preserved”

An Uncertain Grace is the sixth book by Australian poet, television director and author, Krissy Kneen. It consists of five separate short stories, each of which is narrated by a different person; all are loosely linked by certain themes and by the last narrator, who has a role in the first four stories. This is erotic fiction, and sex is a prominent feature of each story, so readers should be prepared for explicit descriptions. Advances in technology, medicine and surgery, as well as a flooded state capital, anchor the stories firmly in some future time.

Kneen’s tales are original and very imaginative: a (lecherous) university lecturer whose former student (and lover) sends him a memoir with a difference, one from which he experiences their relationship from her perspective; a sex offender undergoing experimental treatment to change the nature of his desires; an android boy created solely to study paedophile tendencies; a young woman in the process of transforming into an ungendered state; and an old woman whose consciousness is electronically captured when her body finally fails, exploring a new relationship.

Kneen’s descriptive prose is gorgeous; her stories are clever and interesting; her speculation on the future state is, despite the jellyfish, not the least bit whacky, but instead, quite credible. Kneen’s latest oeuvre is creative, a bit provocative and definitely thought-provoking.