The Idea of Perfection is a 1999 novel by Australian author Kate Grenville.

There Douglas Cheeseman, a shy engineer, is employed to pull down an old timber bridge so it can be replaced with a new concrete version.

He meets Harley Savage, an outspoken museum curator who opposes his work.

Writing in the Australian Book Review Don Anderson noted that the novel is a "love story, though it warms both heart and head, for the bliss it affords is not so much visceral as aesthetic, even architectural...The Idea of Perfection is written with the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of fine structural engineering – a Gladesville Bridge of a novel, though modest.

"[3] After the novel's initial publication in Australia by Picador,[4] it was reprinted as follows: The novel was also translated into Dutch and Danish in 2002, and German in 2008.