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The Spare Room
Published 28 September 2009
ISBN 9781921520280
Format Paperback
Extent 208pp
AU Price $23.95
NZ Price $30.00

The Spare Room

Formats & editions
Paperback
28 Sept 2009
EBook
16 May 2010
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‘I see why people rave about her, I will now too.’ Samantha Harvey

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.
Published 28 September 2009
ISBN 9781921520280
Format Paperback
Extent 208pp
AU Price $23.95
NZ Price $30.00

About the author

Helen Garner

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction, the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, The Spare Room, This House of Grief, The Season, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, which won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and The Mushroom Tapes, with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein.
portrait photo of Helen Garner

Also by Helen Garner

The Mushroom Tapes
The Season
This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial
How to End a Story
Monkey Grip
Everywhere I Look
The Children's Bach
See all

Praise for The Spare Room

This taut, elegant, funny, gorgeous work of art is Helen Garner's best book ever

Peter Carey, Age

No one writes these reports from the suburban front line with quite the passion, the abrupt insights and kitchen table candour of Helen Garner. The Spare Room is a quietly devastating book, written with superbly refined ordinariness, on ageing, women's friendship and how to look death in the eye

Monthly

The Spare Room is a beautifully human story, a compact little gem of empathy and understanding, shot through with humour and grace in a beautifully tactile package

Herald Sun

Helen Garner is a great storyteller and the dialogue is perfection. This is no melodramatic tearjerker—it' a fascinating look at a very difficult and real situation

NZ Women's Weekly