Krissy Kneen does not simply perform the difficult feat of writing wittily about sex, she does so with aplomb. An Uncertain Grace is a formally ingenious and often amusing novel that combines eroticism and science fiction with a playful spirit of intellectual inquisitiveness. Its imaginative conceits and clever manipulations of point of view are used to explore the themes of mismatched desires, mortality, the looming prospect of environmental disaster, and the post-human implications of technological advances.

Kneen is interested in the tantalising possibilities created by the invention of virtual reality, particularly the astonishing prospect that one might literally inhabit another person’s perspective, an idea Kneen links to the experiences of writing and reading fiction and the opportunities these provide for inhabiting the consciousnesses of various characters. Each of the novel’s five sections has a different narrator. Their overlapping stories, linked by the recurring figure of Liv, an academic who specialises in ‘narrative’, develop into a meditation on the meaning and constraints of embodiment and the concept of gender in a futuristic world that has rendered these realities fluid and changeable. Kneen’s writing, by turns playful and elegant, is never less than stimulating, in the literal and figurative senses of the word.