The Childrens Bach

(Paperback)

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A captivating and deeply personal novel from one of Australia's most respected authors.

Athena and Dexter live a happy but insular life, bound by routine and the care of their young sons. When Elizabeth, an old friend from Dexters university days, turns up with her much younger sister, Vicki, and her lover, Philip, she brings an enticing world to their doorstep. And Athena finds herself straining at the confines of her life.

Helen Garner portrays her characters with a clear eye for their dreams, their insecurities and their deep humanity in this intimate and engaging short novel, which was first published in 1984. The Childrens Bach is a jewel, in Ben Lerners description, beautiful, lapidary, rare.

Helen Garner is one of Australias finest authors. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious WindhamCampbell Prize for non-fiction. Her novels include Monkey Grip, The Childrens Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Spare Room.

There was a piano in the kitchen and during the day Athena would shut herself in there under the portrait of Dexters father and pick away at Bartoks Mikrokosmos or the easiest of Bachs Small Preludes. Preludes to what Even under her ignorant fingers those simple chords rang out like a shout of triumph, and she would run to stick her hot face out of the window.

Reviews

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 Garners 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 lightlythe 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. * Harpers *
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 Childrens 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 *
'Garner writes in pulses rather than scenes and keeps up an unsentimental reserve. She is neither lyrical nor fashionably remotejust all sinew...As for the novels miraculous final pages, they get family love right: the farewells at the heart of every homecoming.' * Public Books *
'Childrens Bach is [Garners] masterpiece.' * Public Books *

Author Bio

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious WindhamCampbell Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premiers Book Award. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Spare Room, This House of Grief and Everywhere I Look.