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

About the Author
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She worked as a high school teacher, then as a freelance journalist. Since 1977 she has published novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the 2006 inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the 2016 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction, the 2019 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include This House of Grief, Monkey Grip and The Children's Bach.

Reviews
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 -- Charlotte Wood * GUARDIAN *
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 -- Lucy Scholes * THE DAILY TELEGRAPH *
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 -- Max Liu * FINANCIAL TIMES *
An intelligent, tautly written novel . . . Garner is a natural storyteller -- James Wood * NEW YORKER *
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 *
Her use of language is sublime * SCOTSMAN *
A dreamy sojourn in the druggy, sexy counterculture of mid-1970s Melbourne, Australia . . . High times with the mother of autofiction * KIRKUS REVIEWS *
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 * BOOKLIST *



Book Information
ISBN 9781399606783
Author Helen Garner
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publisher Orion Publishing Co
Weight(grams) 255g
Dimensions(mm) 196mm * 126mm * 26mm