The Spare Room

Helen prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola, who is flying down from Sydney for a three-week visit. But this is no ordinary visit—Nicola has advanced cancer. She is coming to Melbourne to receive treatment she believes will cure her.

From the moment Nicola steps off the plane, Helen becomes her nurse, her protector, her guardian angel and her stony judge.

The Spare Room tells a story of compassion and rage as the two women—one sceptical, one stubbornly serene—negotiate their way through Nicola's gruelling treatments. Garner's dialogue is pitch perfect, her sense of pacing flawless as this novel draws to its terrible and transcendent finale.

‘Truthful, fearless, passionate…beautiful prose that’s lively and even funny, despite the darkness.’ Kate Grenville, Age

‘Honest, unsparing and brave of Garner to lay bare such stark, painful dynamics…[like an] unsparing memoir in which lashes of dark humour and simple happiness…lighten the grim record of an overwhelmingly difficult chapter in a woman’s life.’ Liesl Schillinger, New York Times

‘Only great fiction demands us to reset our moral compass and look at our value coordinates all over again. The Spare Room achieves this...And yet in a book this spare, written with such grace, Garner introduces in the interstices a calm, precise poetry.’ The Times

‘At once artful, gripping and fiercely beautiful...even at the most painful moments Garner maintains a characteristic lightness of touch, a combination of wit and lyricism that is immensely alluring...[an] extraordinary, exhilarating novel [and] a burningly passionate account of the one experience we will all share.’ Olivia Laing, Observer