ONE OF THE BBC’S 100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD
‘Seductive as hell. Brilliant, unusual, breathtaking’ Lauren Groff
‘There are very few writers that I admire more than Helen Garner’ David Nicholls
‘A revelation. Its pages radiate sex and heat, chlorine and rock’n’roll’ Madelaine Lucas
In 1970s Melbourne, Nora is a happy woman.
She is happy moving between the city’s communal households, with her little daughter. Happy with days spent at the public pool, and nights spent dancing and drinking and talking and smoking and loving freely.
But then Nora meets Javo. Javo, with his crooked, wrecked, wild face and his violently blue eyes. And soon she is trapped in the monkey grip of his drug addiction and her own obsessive love for him.
On its first publication in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod in its frank portrayal of the lives of a generation. Now a modern classic, it shows Helen Garner’s dazzling and radical literary voice.
A W&N Essential with an Introduction by Lauren Groff
‘Seductive as hell. Brilliant, unusual, breathtaking’ Lauren Groff
‘There are very few writers that I admire more than Helen Garner’ David Nicholls
‘A revelation. Its pages radiate sex and heat, chlorine and rock’n’roll’ Madelaine Lucas
In 1970s Melbourne, Nora is a happy woman.
She is happy moving between the city’s communal households, with her little daughter. Happy with days spent at the public pool, and nights spent dancing and drinking and talking and smoking and loving freely.
But then Nora meets Javo. Javo, with his crooked, wrecked, wild face and his violently blue eyes. And soon she is trapped in the monkey grip of his drug addiction and her own obsessive love for him.
On its first publication in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod in its frank portrayal of the lives of a generation. Now a modern classic, it shows Helen Garner’s dazzling and radical literary voice.
A W&N Essential with an Introduction by Lauren Groff
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Reviews
An intelligent, tautly written novel . . . Garner is a natural storyteller
Her use of language is sublime
Whichever form she's inhabiting, Garner is great company: perceptive, unsparing of others yet also self-questioning. Her books contain details that radiate long after you finish reading them
Acclaimed Australian writer Garner's achingly poignant portrait of a young woman and the drug addict she loves rings with an authenticity that is, by turns, frustrating and sweet . . . In buoyant and vivid prose, Garner evokes the lies, deceptions, delusions, and hope that come with a life always lived on the edge of despair or delight
A dreamy sojourn in the druggy, sexy counterculture of mid-1970s Melbourne, Australia . . . High times with the mother of autofiction
What Garner offers in these novels is an alternative to the cloying metafiction of the late 20th century and the washed-out realism of the 21st. They are undeniably of their time - the 1970s commitment to the liberating possibilities of sex, drugs and communal living in Monkey Grip, the hangover nursed in the 1980s in The Children's Bach - but they also belong to a literary epoch we think of as long gone, as they earnestly strive to resurrect a modernist art of estrangement
It's the crystalline austerity of Garner's sentences that most enthral me now in Monkey Grip. The lives may be chaotic; the language is anything but. Its cadences are beautiful, its images ever striking, the prose gleaming with a tender, almost chivalrous formality . . . I love Garner's sense of joy; her gutsy, worried humility; her hilarious sense of humour
Brooding, sensual, smartly-written . . . This is one of Garner's greatest talents: her ability to portray life on the page as it's really lived, chaotic, scrappy, sometimes wonderful and oftentimes horrible
