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 is 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 * *
