An extraordinary book of collected short non-fiction, spanning fifty years of work, by one of Australia's great writers.
Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham - Campbell Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier's Book Award. Her most recent book, Everywhere I Look won the 2017 Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction.
‘Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes
and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a
recording angel at life’s secular apocalypses...her unillusioned
eye makes her clarity compulsive.’
*James Wood, New Yorker*
‘Garner can write about everything for every reader…Her tone
throughout is one of considerable charm and approachability. Five
minutes in Garner’s company, you feel, and you’d be telling her
your deepest secrets.’
*Neil Stewart, Civilian Global*
‘[Garner’s] writing expresses a hard-won grace. It brings you
closer to the world, and shows you how to love it.’
*Monthly*
‘Memoirist, fiction writer, faction writer, journalist? Australian
critics and booksellers have stopped trying to pigeonhole
Melburnian writer Helen Garner and now just give her prizes…These
stories and essays are the work of a natural storyteller, of an
unsparing yet sympathetic eye…It’s all wonderful stuff: unstinting
honesty, clarity and charm. Dive in.’
*North & South *
‘This is the power of Garner’s writing. She drills into experience
and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once
you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of
writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this
reason Garner has become part of us all.’
*Australian*
‘True Stories by Helen Garner—I mean, really. Helen. Helen Garner.
Do you hear that sound? It is the sound of glitter cannons
exploding in my heart.’
*Marieke Hardy, Melbourne Writers Festival Staff Summer Reading
List*
‘Stories and True Stories are handsome companion volumes deservedly
celebrating Helen Garner, our greatest contemporary practitioner of
observation, self-interrogation and compassion. Everything she
writes, in her candid, graceful prose, rings true, enlightens,
stays.’
*Joan London, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading *
‘Published in beautiful editions to celebrate life given shape
in words.’
*Drusilla Modjeska, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in
Reading *
‘Both of these books are concerned with moments of heartbreak and
of hope, with loneliness and love, and with great cruelties, and
the things that drive people to them. They are animated by a desire
to understand what seems unfathomable, and to pay attention to the
small pleasures of the everyday. Garner's precise descriptions, her
interest in minute shifts of emotion, and the ways in which we
reveal ourselves to others are always at work in these books, and
make them a real joy to read.’
*Age*
‘Helen Garner is one of Australia’s greatest living writers and her
collection of essays, diary entries and stories written over almost
50 years is just the thing for the lover of fine writing. A
compilation of three non-fiction collections, True Stories: The
Collected Short Non-Fiction covers everything from family, love and
marriage, sex and motherhood to travel, writing and criminal
trials. Her piercing intellect, fearlessness and compassion shine
through in every word.’
*Sydney Morning Herald, Can’t-Put-Down Titles for Summer*
‘Helen Garner’s collections of fiction and nonfiction corroborate
her reputation as a great stylist and a great witness.’
*Books of the Year 2017*
‘Smoking dope and eating spaghetti, the abrupt ending of a happy
marriage, the psychological effect of wearing stripes. Helen Garner
takes slivers of daily life, sometimes the most mundane, and gently
folds them into poetry on the page.’
*Australian Gourmet Traveller*
‘As I leaf through the volumes, having just re-read both of them, I
am still brought up short by another revelatory insight of the
everyday…I could go on and on, but I am out of words. Many happy
returns Helen Garner!’
*Adelaide Advertiser*
‘This collection of columns, essays and feature writing from the
early 1970s to the present is a real treat, offering immersive
journalism, humour, whimsy and analysis.’
*Overland*
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