The Spare Room 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 ... Read moreis no answer except: Helen Garner is a great writer; The Spare Room is a great book.
Peter Carey Garner 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 Herald

Helen Garner writes the best sentences in Australia.

The Bulletin

Garner, in everything she writes, is an indelible stylist, a shaper of events, a distiller of meaning

ABR

Acutely pleasurable, acutely painful
Fay Weldon Outstandingly vivid.

Sunday Times

Garner 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 Review

The 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

TLS

A 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

Observer

Its 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 Times

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

Mslexia

This novel's extraordinary feat is to be at once affecting, involving and sharply funny.

The Sunday Times

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