Three multi-award winning authors, Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be in conversation with Beejay Silcox on their book The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial

In July 2023, in the quiet Gippsland town of Leongatha, Erin Patterson—stay-at-home mother and true-crime devotee—invited her husband’s devoutly Christian family to lunch. Within days, three of her guests were dead and the fourth was in a coma. They had all been poisoned by death cap mushrooms. Two years later, Patterson stood trial, accused of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. The court case gripped the nation and fascinated people all over the world.

Among those drawn into the drama were three of Australia’s greatest literary forces: Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. Together, they  spent long days immersed in the case’s sinister and complex themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder. In The Mushroom Tapes, they examine the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, the tension between truth and narrative, ethics and entertainment, justice and voyeurism, and confront their own ambivalence about the record of true crime.