Showing results by author "Helen Garner" in All Categories

The Spare Room tells a story of compassion, humour and rage. The two women - one skeptical, one stubbornly serene - negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's bizarre therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale.

This House of Grief is a heartbreaking audiobook by one of Australia's most admired authors. Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain.

Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work. With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another - how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising.

In October 1997, a clever young law student at the Australian National University made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests—most of them students—had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder.

Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love - Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends. Helen Garner’s gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece - the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs and sex.

Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I spans a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip.

Athena and Dexter live a happy but insular life, bound by routine and the care of their young sons. When Elizabeth, an old friend from Dexter’s university days, turns up with her much younger sister, Vicki, and her lover, Philip, she brings an enticing world to their doorstep. And Athena finds herself straining at the confines of her life.

In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The controversial book that Helen Garner wrote about the resulting Ormond College sexual harassment case caused a social media storm. Prominent feminists were outraged at Garner's perceived support for the man involved, but many saw her approach a necessary and much welcome nuance towards the power dynamic between men and women.

Helen Garner is one of the most “prodigiously gifted” writers of our time (New York Times Book Review), best known for her intricate portraits of “ordinary people in difficult times” (New York Times). In The Season, she trains her keen, journalistic eye on the most difficult time of all: adolescence. Garner and her grandson Amby are deep in the throes of a shared obsession with Australian football—or “footy”—as Amby advances into his local club’s Under-16s. From her trademark remove, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition on the field.

Spanning 15 years of work, Everywhere I Look is an audiobook full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of rereading Pride and Prejudice.

Helen Garner visits the morgue, and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She sees women giving birth, and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning 50 and the storm caused by The First Stone. Her story on the murder of the two-year-old Daniel Valerio wins her a Walkley Award.

Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time, she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship—and the truth of her own self.

This collected short fiction celebrates one of Australia’s most loved authors. These stories - that delve into the complexities of love and longing, of the pain, darkness and joy of life - are all told with Helen Garner's characteristic sharpness of observation, honesty and humour. Each one a perfect piece, together they showcase Garner’s mastery of the form.

He straightened his spine, raised his head, and extended his gun arm towards me in a slow, vertical arc. I saw then what he was, and stood still in front of him, for he was here on business. He was a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy. Janet is a skeptic, a journalist; Maxine revels in New Age fantasies; and Ray, a drifter, is a born-again Christian. The common ground is the house they share. But their fragile domestic balance is about to explode amid the smashing of ukeleles, the unexpected ascension of an angel and a sudden shower of jonquils.

These stories - that delve into the complexities of love and longing, of the pain, darkness and joy of life - are all told with Helen Garner's characteristic sharpness of observation, honesty and humour. Each one a perfect piece, together they showcase Garner’s mastery of the form.

Wie begleitet man die beste Freundin auf ihrer letzten Reise? Als sie ihre Freundin Nicola einlädt, für eine dreiwöchige Krebstherapie bei ihr zu wohnen, ist Helen nicht bewusst, was es bedeutet einen sterbenden Menschen zu begleiten. In einer glasklaren Sprache, getragen von liebevollem Humor, erzählt Helen Garner vom Ringen um das Leben, um eine Freundschaft und einen würdevollen Tod. Auf Wunderheilung hofft Nicola vergebens - es ist Helen Garner die ein Wunder vollbringt: wir lesen eine tieftraurige Geschichte und fühlen uns bewegt, gestärkt, amüsiert und auf wundersame Weise versöhnt mit der gebrechlichen Einrichtung unserer Welt.