The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

'A jewel of a novel about a perfect family falling apart' DAVID NICHOLLS
'A slim, deeply humane work that tingles with life' THE TIMES
'One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century' MERVE EMRE

Athena and Dexter Fox are content. They love each other. They are friends.

They live with their two young sons in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls cracking, its floors sloping and its doors hanging loosely in their frames. There is a piano in their kitchen.

But then, Dexter runs into Elizabeth, an old friend from his university days. She brings into his world her loose-living musician boyfriend, Philip, and her seventeen-year-old sister, Vicki.

And all at once, the bonds that hold the Fox family together begin to fray.

Since its first publication in 1984, The Children's Bach has been hailed as one of only four perfect short novels in the English language, one of the greatest family novels ever written and Garner's masterpiece.

A W&N Essential with an introduction by David Nicholls

[A] spare, subtle, technically sophisticated novella about a cluster of family and friends in suburban Melbourne.. Garner, one of Australia's most admired writers, is a master anatomist of ordinary lives across fiction and non-fiction... which refuses to be constrained by the conventions of literary form... a kind of choral consciousness in which one character's perspective slips into another's to create a complex story about love and sex that vibrates with life. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * THE TIMES *
Brooding, sensual, smartly-written... This is one of Garner's greatest talents: her ability to portray life on the page as it's really lived, chaotic, scrappy, sometimes wonderful and oftentimes horrible. -- Lucy Scholes * THE DAILY TELEGRAPH *
The perfect example of a novel that omits, but provides enough rich detail to make the reader's work pay off... A tour de force of control and variety. -- John Self * THE CRITIC *
Whichever form she's inhabiting, Garner is great company: perceptive, unsparing of others yet also self-questioning. Her books contain details that radiate long after you finish reading them. -- Max Liu * FINANCIAL TIMES *
A slim, deeply humane work that tingles with life. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * THE TIMES, Best Books of 2024 *
Australian novelist Helen Garner, writer of wonderful, pitilessly sharp-eyed domestic dramas, deserves to be better known, and this reissue of her 1984 novel, with an introduction by David Nicholls, is a corker... Garner writes delicious sentences and is crystal clear that life is a messy business. -- Katie Law * COLLAGERIE *
One of the most significant Australian novels of the last fifty years... It combines omniscience with dirty-realist minimalism - a unique tenor lying somewhere between the styles of George Eliot and Raymond Carver - darting from one short episode to the next without exposition or anything but the most efficient kind of scene-setting. -- Chris Power * LITERARY REVIEW *
Helen Garner portrays her characters with a clear eye for their dreams, their insecurities and their deep humanity in this intimate and engaging short novel, which was first published in 1984. * Anne Enright *

Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She worked as a high school teacher, then as a freelance journalist. Since 1977 she has published novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the 2006 inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the 2016 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction, the 2019 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include This House of Grief, Monkey Grip and The Children's Bach.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781399606820
ISBN 10	1399606824
Title	The Children's Bach
Author	Helen Garner
Series	W And N Essentials
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Orion Publishing Co
Year published	2024-03-14
Number of pages	176
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.