The Spare Room by Helen Garner
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 two women - one sceptical, one stubbornly serene - negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's bizarre therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale.
Helen Garner is one of Australia's most awarded and highly regarded writers. She was born in 1942 in Geelong, and was educated there and at Melbourne University. She taught in Victorian secondary schools until 1972, when she was dismissed for answering her students' questions about sex, and had to start writing journalism for a living. Her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977, won the 1978 National Book Council Award, and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then Garner has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism. Her screenplay The Last Days of Chez Nous was filmed in 1990. Garner has won many prizes, among them a Walkley Award for her 1993 article about the murder of two-year-old Daniel Valerio. In 1995 she published The First Stone, a controversial account of a Melbourne University sexual harassment case. Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004) was a non-fiction study of two murder trials in Canberra. In 2006 Helen Garner received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, The Spare Room (2008), won numerous prizes and has been translated into many languages. Helen Garner lives in Melbourne, Australia. Ramona Koval is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She is the editor of Best Australian Essays and was the presenter of ABC Radio National's The Book Show. Her most recent book was Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, a collection of her international literary interviews.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781921351396 |
| ISBN 10 | 192135139X |
| Title | The Spare Room |
| Author | Helen Garner |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Text Publishing |
| Year published | 2008-04-07 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Prizes | Winner of Barbara Jefferis Award 2009, Winner of Queensland Premier's Literary Awards: Best Fiction Book 2008, Winner of Victorian Premier's Literary Award - Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction 2008, Short-listed for Australian Literature Society Gold Medal 2009, Short-listed for NSW Premier's Literary Award Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2009 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |