by Helen Garner
www.penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-74228-213-8
ALSO BY HELEN GARNER
The Children’s Bach
Athena and Dexter lead a frumpish, happy family life, sheltered from the tackier aspects of the modern world and bound by duty towards a disturbed child. Their comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter’s past. With her three charming, chaotic hangers-on, she draws the couple out into a foreign world. In the upheaval Athena see a way out: it leads into a place whose casual egotism she has dreamed of without being able to imagine its consequences. How can they get home again?
‘The Children’s Bach, like the fugue, works its magic most powerfully upon the subconscious mind . . . it is a celebration of family life in the context of the thousand natural shocks that it is heir to in modern times.’ Book World
Honour & Other People's Children
‘Helen Garner is an extraordinarily good writer. There is not a paragraph, let alone a page, where she does not compel your attention.’ The Bulletin
In two of Helen Garner’s finest short stories, she examines the idiosyncratic and bothersome notions of honour by which her characters – adults and children – shape their untidy lives.
Honour is about a couple whose marriage, though abandoned in practice, persists in spirit. But the arrival of a new lover obliges them to make a proper separation and draw their child into the conflict.
Other People’s Children is a witty, sad story of the breakdown of friendship between two women, Scotty and Ruth, and the collapse of their collective household. Scotty loves Ruth’s daughter as only the childless can love other people’s children, but the broken friendship leaves Scotty with no claims. Into this mess blunders Madigan, looking for something that Scotty has long ago trained herself not to give.
Postcards from Surfers
Late in the afternoon my mother and Auntie Lorna and I walk along the beach to Surfers. The tide is out: our bare feet scarcely mark the firm sand. Their two voices run on, one high, one low. If I speak they pretend to listen, just as I feign attention to their endless, looping discourses: these are our courtesies: this is love. Everything is spoken, nothing is said.
From one of Australia’s most celebrated writers come eleven stories about the complexities of life and love; of looking back and longing; of what it means to be a stranger, on foreign ground and known, told with the piercing familiarity and resonance we have come to expect from Helen Garner. Remarkably honest, often very funny and always woven in ways that surprise, these stories tease out everyday life to show the darkness underneath – but also the possibilities of joy.
‘She glories in the ordinary and makes it glow’
Adelaide Advertiser