In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The shock of these charges split the community and painfully focused the de...
Athena and Dexter lead an enclosed family life, innocent of fashion and bound towards a disturbed child. Their comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter's past. With her three charming, chaotic hangers-on, she draws the couple out into a world whose casual ...
In "Monkey Grip", Helen Garner charts the lives of a generation. Her characters are exploring new ways of loving and living - and nothing is harder than learning to love lightly. Nora and Javo are trapped in a desperate relationship. Nora's addiction is romantic love; Javo's is hard drugs. The ha...
Janet retreats to her house and labours at forgetting the past; Ray hides from the past in the pages of his gold-edged book, waiting for his brother to reconnect him to life. But Maxine bursts the barricade that separates dream from reality and hacks a path for all of them to the future.
One of the great joys in a book of short stories, is being able to pick it off the shelf and read just one brief tale to transform your perspective. Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers, as the title might suggest, does just that. But it doesn’t just take you out of your own little view of the w...
You’d need to have spent your life in a cave not to know about Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, the ill-natured, land-owning über-spunk; Miss Elizabeth Bennet, sharp as a tack with a will of her own; her skewed array of sisters; her disengaged, ironic father; and her insufferable mother, the archetypal nine...
Deceived wives and widowers, men who’ve never been loved and don’t know why, Russian crew forced to leave their children behind for years at a time, grown women who’ve just buried a beloved parent, people with cancer travelling to the cold before they die. They say people come here looking for ‘s...
Her shoulders were bent. It was hard for her to walk.‘Shouldn’t we get you some stronger drugs?’ I said.‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s the treatments causing the pain—that’s how I know they’re working. It’s just the toxins coming out.’She chewed a morsel of toast with honey and drank a cup of tea...
A skid mark happens when all four wheels lock and are dragged along the ground by the vehicle’s momentum. A yaw mark occurs typically when a car is over-steered, and front and back tyres track separately, leaving four tyre marks instead of two. And a rolling print is simply the impression left by...
I would need the fingers of both hands to count the women of my age (forty-nine) and slightly younger who, when I mentioned to them that I was reading The Change, dropped their eyes with a shudder and said, ‘Ugh—I don’t want to know about menopause. I don’t even want to think about it.* ‘No, no!’...