Helen has little idea what lies ahead when she offers her spare room to an old friend of fifteen years. Nicola has arrived in the city for treatment for cancer. Sceptical of the medical establishment, placing all her faith in an alternative health centre, Nicola is determined to find her own way to deal with her illness, regardless of the advice that Helen can offer.
In the weeks that follow, Nicola's battle against her cancer will turn not only her own life upside down but also those of everyone around her.
THE SPARE ROOM is a magical gem of a book that packs a huge punch, charting a friendship as it is tested by the threat of death.
Helen Garner's style is informal, but there is no denying the force of her storytelling . . . This is a novel that will stay with you, perhaps against your wishes.
In its bleak and highly comic storytelling, despite the subject matter, the novel's main concern is how people behave towards each other and the repercussions of that behaviour.
This is no mere cancer memoir. Rather, in Garner's brilliant retelling, it is a complex examination of the limits of friendship and of the problems of remaining a single woman into middle age . . . This is a superbly clever novel.
GuardianA tart exploration of friendship under trying circumstances, The Spare Room packs a lot into a volume as short as it is sentimental. There's humour to be found in Nicola's crackpot remedies, but it is of the desperate kind that doesn't obscure the sad truths found in the book.
Colin Waters, Sunday HeraldBleak and comic, written with unflinching candour.
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Erica Wagner, The TimesThis novel is admirably scraped clean of sentimentality . . . the most powerful curative is a good dose of laughter, which is abundant in the spare, lucid prose even as it hurtles along with the inexorability of death.
Anita Sethi, Independent on SundayBleak and highly comic storytelling.
Penny Perrick, Sunday TimesThis is a superbly clever novel, in which death looms large, while the narrative and the narrator exist in vital present: cancer is a fact of life, not an ending.
GuardianA compulsively readable, searing novel...the best book I have read for years. Beautifully written, The Spare Room is terse and pacy. Every taut sentence rings with painful purity and attack
Stevie Davies, IndependentGarner writes with the cool authority of personal experience, and apprehends Helen and Nicola's loving and warring worlds in such fine and sensuous detail that pain itself is rendered beautiful
Sunday TelegraphA wise and affecting book.
Daily MailExceptional...an unsettling and skilled work that raises important questions about the process of dying and what caring ewll for the dying requires. ... So powerful is The Spare Room's communication of the the triumphs and failures involved in dying...[that] ther reader painfully ricochets between the various positions...somehow as we read we actually become these characters.
Financial TimesThis novel's extraordinary feat is to be at once affecting, involving and sharply funny.
The Sunday TimesGarner skillfully builds the tension in this short tale; her prose is adept her characters well-developed...The is a raw, spare tale, very human and very direct.
Claudia Vilato, MslexiaGarner is a storyteller, an observer...Her style is beautifully simple...People who are on a fixed diet of fiction or who graze on airport shelves could cleanse their palates with Garner as they might once have done with Jane Austen.
Sydney Morning HeraldHelen Garner writes the best sentences in Australia.
The BulletinGarner, in everything she writes, is an indelible stylist, a shaper of events, a distiller of meaning
ABRAcutely pleasurable, acutely painful
Fay WeldonA piece of fiction at once artful, gripping and fiercly 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 . . a burningly passionate account of the one experience we all will share - the journey out of life.
Olivia Laing, ObserverIts embattled characters are so real that by the last page you feel not just that you have read a magnificent novel but that you have experienced life itself.
The TimesOutstandingly vivid.
Sunday TimesGarner is known for her frankness, her distinctive blend of tender affection and brutal truth-telling . . . [The Spare Room] is a powerful piece of work . . . Garner has insights aplenty.
Michel Faber, Guardian ReviewThe false hope peddled by the Theodore Insitute and others like it is a fair target, which Garner's novel hits unerringly . . [Garner] is a careful and considerate observer . . . things, people and conversations are described briefly and with simplicity but . . . are placed with an insight that can be devastating.
Caroline Miller, TLSIt is a perfect novel, imbued with all Garner's usual clear-eyed grace but with some other magnificent dimension that hides between the lines of her simple conversational voice. How is it that she can enter this heart-breaking territory – the dying friend who comes to stay – and make it not only bearable, but glorious, and funny? There is no answer except: Helen Garner is great writer; The Spare Room is a great book.
Peter CareyIt's a book which asks unavoidable and painful questions, not least about the nature of friendship, with a clarity that offers no room for evasion. It refuses to offer easy answers or false comfort. A book for grown-up people, in other words. And the Lord knows, there are a lot of the other sort about.
Hilary MantelThe Spare Room is a story of tough love and friendship and amazement at the bravado and resourcefulness of human beings in the face of death, written in a prose that has surgical precision. This reviewer knows at least one old man who does read novels: himself. Read this novel. It is truer than non-fiction.
Weekend AustralianMy response to the book swung from cringing to crying to pleasurable stabs of shock at the narrator's honesty. ... Many of the scenes...are observed with the blunt tenderness, bravery and acute detail that make Garner's writing so interesting and memorable...
AgeThe story is what matters. The main thing to be said is that this short but far from slight book is very good indeed. The next is that it could have been written by no one else but Garner, whose voice is unique. ...”A novel is made up of scraps of our own lives and bits of other people's, and things we think of in the middle of the night and whole notebooks full of randomly collected details,” Garner once told an interviewer. It is her great skill that she can weave these into a story that is perfectly paced, as gripping as a crime thriller.
Australian Literary Review
