Scholarly success demands a certain ascetic discipline and Annabel, the protagonist of Rosalind Brown’s exceptional debut novel, thinks she’s adopted all the right habits. She’s spending a cold Sunday at the end of January in her Oxford rooms, rising early, drinking mint tea. Practice for finals. No coffee allowed until breakfast, then maybe a run, a balanced lunch, yoga. As few distractions as possible so she can plunge into her essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. But this being Oxford, there’s no structured topic, and Annabel is floundering. She hasn’t written a word.

Despite efforts to account for each minute of her day, diversions continually appear. There’s her mother, trying to schedule a phone call. And student friends, who both admire and mock her strict routine. She sees some of them at dinner in halls, also part of her daily practice. But the most persistent distraction is Rich, her 30-something boyfriend, who wants her to commit to him visiting the following weekend.

This deft, observant, interior novel about reading, set across one day, takes us into Annabel’s mind as it sits with the sonnets and meanders towards other things. Mostly, she thinks about sex, with Rich, real and imagined. Brown details these erotic reveries vividly. But Annabel experiences pleasure as a battle between her mind and body, enacted by imaginary, archetypal figures she calls Scholar and Seducer. Eventually, her insistence on solitude raises a moral dilemma and the necessity for other people.

Practice is drily funny, and also bleakly incisive about the particular pressure experienced by some smart young women to strive for perfection. Too much self-discipline can turn dark. Annabel discovers that ecstasy exists between the lines and outside the rules. She begins to ask for what she wants. A new practice for living.

When I read Practice’s blurb, I suspected I’d love it. It was just a feeling, but I was right. It’s a small book about very big things – how we experience the world through language. The first essential novel of 2024.