Helen prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola, who is flying down from Sydney for a visit. But this is no ordinary visit - Nicola has advanced cancer. She is coming to Melbourne to receive treatment. A story of compassion and rage as two women - one sceptical, one stubbornly serene - negotiate their way through Nicola's gruelling treatments.

Helen prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola, who is flying down from Sydney for a three-week visit. But this is no ordinary visit-Nicola has advanced cancer. She is coming to Melbourne to receive treatment she believes will cure her. From the moment Nicola steps off the plane, Helen becomes her nurse, her protector, her guardian angel and her stony judge. The Spare Room tells a story of compassion and rage as the two women-one sceptical, one stubbornly serene-negotiate their way through Nicola's gruelling treatments. Garner's dialogue is pitch perfect, her sense of pacing flawless as this novel draws to its terrible and transcendent finale.

Details

ISBN13: 9781921520280
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 208
Edition:
Publication Date:
Publisher: Text Publishing
Publication City, Country: Melbourne, Australia
Dimensions (cm): 20(H)x13.1(L)x1.4(W)172
Weight (gm): 172

Author Biography

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction, the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach, The First Stone, Joe Cinque's Consolation, The Spare Room, This House of Grief, The Season, How to End a Story- Collected Diaries, which won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and The Mushroom Tapes, with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein.

Reviews

‘Garner’s gradual awakening to her unadmitted anger is what gives her best book, her novel The Spare Room, much of its shattering power…The novel closes: “It was the end of my watch, and I handed her over.” Helen has done as much as she can do. It is a typical Garner sentence, a writing lesson (all novels should end as completely) and a life lesson: spare, deserved, and complexly truthful, both a confession of failure and a small song of success.’ -- James Wood * New Yorker *