When Helen invites her old friend Nicola to stay in her spare room, she has no idea what she is taking on: for Nicola has cancer, and from the moment she staggers through the front door, imperious, deluded and maddeningly endearing, she turns Helen's life inside out.
In the three weeks that follow, Helen is driven through extremes of rage and tenderness to become Nicola's nurse, protector, guardian angel and stony judge.
The Spare Room is an unforgettable novel about the distance a friendship mus travel, and the depths it must plumb, when confronted by the threat of death. It is full of wisdom, dark laughter and truth.
This novel's extraordinary feat is to be at once affecting, involving and sharply funny.
This novel's extraordinary feat is to be at once affecting, involving and sharply funny.
Garner 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
