The Children's Bach

‘Garner is a natural storyteller.’ * James Wood, New Yorker *
‘What a wonderful writer. Her prose is spare and beautiful, her stories are truthful and touching. There are very few writers that I admire more than Helen Garner.’ – David Nicholls
‘Her use of language is sublime.’ * Scotsman *
‘This is the power of Garner’s writing. She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all.’ * Australian *
‘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 on The Spare Room *
‘Garner wears her mastery lightly—the novel never draws undue attention to its own modernist tricks. Unfolding, as the title suggests, like a halting piece of music, its effects are subtle and unexpected.’ * Harper’s *
‘This book feels restorative, filled with carefully observed moments.’ * Overland *
‘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.’ * London Review of Books *

Helen Garner (Author)

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction, the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the Australian Society of Authors Medal.

Her books include:

• Monkey Grip
• The Children’s Bach
• The First Stone
• Joe Cinque’s Consolation
• The Spare Room
• This House of Grief
• The Season
• How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (winner of the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction)
• The Mushroom Tapes (with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein)

Ben Lerner (Introducer)

Ben Lerner was born in Kansas in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Howard and MacArthur Foundations.

His novels include:

• Leaving the Atocha Station (winner of the 2012 Believer Book Award)
• 10:04 (a finalist for the Folio Prize and named one of the best books of 2014 by more than a dozen major publications)

He has published three poetry collections:

• The Lichtenberg Figures
• Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry)
• Mean Free Path

Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.

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