The Spare Room
Hardcover | ISBN: 9781921351396 | RRP: $29.95 | 208pp
About this book
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.
Praise for The Spare Room
‘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 a great writer; The Spare Room is a great book.’ Peter Carey
'The Spare Room : Garner's first novel in fifteen years, a lean claustrophobic drama about a cancer sufferer and the friend she calls on for help, illuminates the big questions of what it means to be human, and makes me glad I am a reader.' Australian Literary Review
‘Masterful.’ Vogue
‘It’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 Mantel
About the Author
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. Her award-winning books include novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction, including The First Stone (1995) and Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004). The Spare Room is her first work of fiction in fifteen years.
When Hanna Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her
Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript which has been
recovered from the smouldering ruins of war–torn Sarajevo, she
knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A
renowned book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia
to start work on restoring The Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish
prayer book –– to discover its secrets and piece together the
story of its miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in
motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hanna's orderly
life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young
librarian who risked his life to save the book.
As meticulously researched as all of Brooks' previous work,
People of the Book is a gripping and moving novel about war,
art, love and survival.
ISBN: 9780732280376; ISBN-10: 0732280370; Publication Date:
01/02/2008; Format: Trade Paperback; $32.99