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Publication
Picador (2010), Edition: 1 Reprint, 175 pages
Description
Helen lovingly prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola. She is coming to visit for three weeks, to receive treatment she believes will cure her cancer. From the moment Nicola staggers off the plane, gaunt and hoarse but still somehow grand, Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian angel and her stony judge. The Spare Room tells a story of compassion, humour and rage. The two women-one sceptical, one stubbornly serene-negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's bizarre therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale.
Media reviews
One sweltering summer day, Helen Garner joined mourners at the funeral of a former member of a performing troupe whose lives she had chronicled in her 1977 debut novel Monkey Grip, that tale of smack habits, communal houses and plenty of lustful sex. When the simple pine coffin was lowered to its
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resting place by men who took turns shovelling earth in keeping with Jewish ritual, "Helen pushed right to the front, to the lip of the grave, and got out her notebook and started to write," recalls theatre director Peter King. `Some people thought, `Oh my God.'" Show Less
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2010)
Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Shortlist — 2009)
Queensland Premier's Literary Award (Winner — Fiction — 2008)
Barbara Jefferis Award (Winner — 2009)
Victorian Premier's Literary Award (Winner — Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction — 2008)
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards (Shortlist — Fiction — 2008)
Language
Physical description
175 p.; 5.5 inches
ISBN
0312428170 / 9780312428174