Athena and Dexter live a happy but insular life, bound by routine and the care of their young sons. When Elizabeth, an old friend from Dexter's university days, turns up, she brings an enticing world to their doorstep and Athena finds herself straining at the confines of her life.? This intimate and engaging short novel was first published in 1984. The Children's Bach is 'a jewel', in Ben Lerner's description, 'beautiful, lapidary, rare'.

Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain. On the evening of 4 September 2005, Father's Day, Robert Farquharson, a separated husband, was driving his three sons home to their mother, Cindy, when his car left the road and plunged into a dam. The boys, aged ten, seven and two, drowned. Was this an act of revenge or a tragic accident? The court case became Helen Garner's obsession. She followed it on its protracted course until the final verdict. In this utterly compelling book, Helen Garner tells the story of a man and his broken life. She presents the theatre of the courtroom with its actors and audience - all gathered to witness to the truth - players in the extraordinary and unpredictable drama of the quest for justice. This House of Grief is a heartbreaking and unputdownable book by one of Australia's most admired writers.

Helen Garner's first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece - the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex. When Nora falls in love with Javo, she is caught in the web of his addiction; and as he moves between loving her and leaving, between his need for her and promises broken, Nora's life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go.

When Helen offers her spare room to her old friend Nicola, she has little idea of what lies ahead. Nicola has cancer and, sceptical of the medical establishment, is in the city for a course of alternative treatment. She is determined to deal with her illness in her own way, regardless of the advice that Helen can offer. In the weeks that follow, Nicola's fight against cancer will turn not only her own life upside down but the lives of everyone around her. Told with humour and honesty, this unforgettable novel charts a friendship as it is tested in the face of death.

In her first novel in fifteen years, Helen Garner writes about the joys and limits of female friendship under the transforming pressure of illness. "The clear-eyed grace of her prose" in this darkly funny and unsparing novel has been hailed by Peter Carey as "the work of a great writer." Garlanded with awards, dazzling reviewers around the globe, "The Spare Room" is destined to be a modern literary classic.