Monkey Grip

‘Monkey Grip was one of the first recognisably Melbourne novels I read...It was populated by people who spoke, felt and behaved in a way I could recognise, who cared about familiar things, were flawed in ways that rang true to me. I've returned to it every few years since. It still leaves me feeling like I've come through a spin cycle.’

Jennifer Down

‘This book makes me remember the person I was in my youth. Like all Garner’s work, it also makes me examine who I am now.’

Charlotte Wood

‘[Monkey Grip] was my first Helen Garner novel, and it had a profound effect on me. Hot, fresh, plain Australian language. I'd finally read something that felt familiar.’

Rose Byrne

‘The novel unravelled me when I first read it. The writing is so sharp it’s almost wounding, and it consolidates so many of my personal interests: doomed love, new iterations of family and–of course–swimming pools.’

Benjamin Law

‘Monkey Grip taught me as no other book had that women’s experience can be central, not peripheral…I was fifteen when I first read it and it altered me irrevocably, as all great literature should.’

Tegan Bennett-Daylight

‘Monkey Grip is a book about being young. It celebrates love, lust, confusion and pain with an intensity undiminished over decades.’

Bernadette Brennan

‘I am sixteen, I pick up Helen Garner's Monkey Grip off the shelf, and I start reading. One hour later, I am sitting cross-legged on the bookshop floor, still devouring it. I am falling in love with Nora and I am falling in love with Garner.’

Christos Tsiolkas

‘Monkey Grip (1977), was made into a film, and the precision of her prose, the way she lets her images hint at psychological depths that her characters barely comprehend, feels tautly cinematic.’

The Wall Street Journal

‘Monkey Grip is beautifully under-plotted and immersive; marked by tonal variation and structural ease, the finished shape of the book affords the pleasure of musical completion. … one of those books so authentically of its time and place that, once read, it is hard to think of Melbourne without it.’

Anne Enright

‘Unrepentant and brilliant.’

Chris Kraus