The Spare Room

The Spare Room

by Helen Garner
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 01/04/2015

Share This eBook:

  $20.99

Winner of the Victorian and Queensland Premier's Literary Awards for Fiction. The Spare Room is an extraordinary work of fiction from one of Australia's


best-selling and most admired writers.


Helen lovingly prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola. She is coming to visit for three weeks, to receive treatment she believes will cure her cancer. From the moment Nicola staggers off the plane, gaunt and hoarse but still somehow grand, Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian angel and her stony judge.


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


'A perfect novel, imbued with all Garner's usual clear-eyed grace but with some other magnificent dimension that hides between the lines of her simple conversational voice. How is it that she can enter this heart-breaking territory-the dying friend who comes to stay-and make it not only bearable, but glorious, and funny?' Peter Carey


‘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

ISBN:
9781921776441
9781921776441
Category:
Fiction
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
01-04-2015
Language:
English
Publisher:
The Text Publishing Company
Helen Garner

Helen Garner (born 7 November 1942) is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.

Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip, was published in 1977, and immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene. She is known for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her both praise and criticism, particularly with her novels, Monkey Grip and The Spare Room.

Throughout her career, Garner has written both fiction and non-fiction. She attracted controversy with her book The First Stone about a sexual harassment scandal in a university college. She has also written for film and theatre, and has consistently won awards for her work.

This item is delivered digitally

You can find this item in:

Show more Show less

Reviews

Be the first to review The Spare Room.