Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

MONKEY GRIP

Helen Garner

Helen Garner's gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiecethe novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex.

When Nora falls in love with Javo, she is caught in the web of his addiction; and as he moves between loving her and leaving, between his need for her and promises broken, Nora's life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go.

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 Literature Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier's Book Award. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Available products
Book Published 1977-05-10 by Text Publishing

Comments

"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 the lithe sentences, the discriminating eye. I love Garner's sense of joy; her gutsy, worried humility; her hilarious sense of humour. Her willingness to be as honest on the page as any writer can be about real things small things, inner things; ugly and true and shameful things. This is what matters to me." Charlotte Wood, in the foreword to the 2017 re-release (reprinted in The Guardian) Read more...