Helen Garner's 'Everywhere I Look' published in the UK
Today, 29 September, 2016 Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner is released to the UK market by Text Publishing. This essay collection contains fifteen years-worth of extraordinary writing from one of Australia’s greatest authors.
“‘At the turn of the millennium I reached the end of my masochism, and came home from Sydney with my tail between my legs. Single again. Tenants were still living in my Fitzroy house, and the one I rented for myself in Ascot Vale was too narrow for the table I’d had trucked down the Hume Highway. I offered it to my niece. She turned up with a bloke in a Ute and away they went. I stood in the bare room.
What can happen at the kitchen table when you haven’t even got one?’
”
Helen Garner is one of Australia’s greatest writers. Her short non-fiction has enormous range. Spanning fifteen years of work, Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and laughter. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice.
Everywhere I Look includes Garner’s famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer.
Praise for the author:
“‘Helen Garner is an invaluable guide into harrowing territory and offers powerful and unforgettable insights.’ ”
“‘Garner’s prose is so very pleasant to read—dry, relaxed sentences that calmly reach out towards loveliness…[Her] willingness to look at and truly see the failures of human behaviour, in herself no less than in others, that lends her work its power.’ ”
“‘Compassionate and dispassionate in equal measure…Helen Garner takes us into the courtroom and shows a melting-pot of venality. She writes with a profound understanding of human vulnerability, and of the subtle workings of love, memory and remorse.’ ”
About the author:
Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, and was educated there and at Melbourne University. Her first novel, Monkey Grip, won the 1978 National Book Council Award, and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism including The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and The Spare Room which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction and the Barbara Jefferis Award, and has been translated into many languages. Helen Garner lives in Melbourne.
