Beautifully written, The Spare Room is terse and pacy.For some reason I had in my head that Helen Garner would be a prim and proper writer (whatever that means). Swift, beautiful and relentless, The Spare Room is a brutal novel in the best sense - ALICE SEBOLDĬompulsively readable, searing. This is a superbly clever novel * * Guardian * * Rather, in Garner's brilliant retelling, it is a complex examination of the limits of friendship and of the problems of remaining a single woman into middle age. Its embattled characters are so real that by the last page you feel not just that you have read a magnificent novel but that you have experienced life itself - PENNY PERRICK * * Sunday Times * * In its bleak and highly comic storytelling, in spite, or perhaps, because of its subject matter, The Spare Room could be called a comedy of manners, in that its concern is how people behave towards each other and the repercussions of that behaviour. Yet it is also an oddly exhilarating book - often funny, and grounded in a kind of ordinariness that is deeply restorative * * Financial Times * *Ī wise and affecting book * * Daily Mail * * This extraordinary effect results in an uncomfortable read. Somehow as we read we actually become these characters. the reader painfully ricochets between the various positions. So powerful is The Spare Room's communication of the the triumphs and failures involved in dying. an unsettling and skilled work that raises important questions about the process of dying and what caring well for the dying requires.
And yet in a book this spare, written with such grace, Garner introduces in the interstices a calm, precise poetry * * The Times * *Įxceptional. Only great fiction demands us to reset our moral compass and look at our value coordinates all over again. How is it that she can enter this heartbreaking territory - the dying friend who comes to stay - and make it not only bearable, but glorious, and funny? There is no answer except: Helen Garner is a great writer The Spare Room is a great book - PETER CAREY
extraordinary, exhilarating novel a burningly passionate account of the one experience we will all share - OLIVIA LAING * * Observer * *Ī 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. even at the most painful moments Garner maintains a characteristic lightness of touch, a combination of wit and lyricism that is immensely alluring. At once artful, gripping and fiercely beautiful.
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