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Children's Bach

Helen Garner

'A jewel of a novel about a perfect family falling apart'
DAVID NICHOLLS

'The Children's Bach is Garner's masterpiece'
PUBLIC BOOKS

'A perfect novel. I was so stunned that I wanted to run around the block'
RUMAAN ALAM

Athena and Dexter Fox are happy. They love each other. They are friends.

They live with their young sons in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls cracking, its floors sloping and its doors hanging loosely in their frames. There is a piano in their kitchen.

But then, one day - years after their lives have taken different directions - Dexter runs into Elizabeth, an old friend from his university days. She brings into his world her loose-living musician boyfriend, Philip, and her seventeen-year-old sister, Vicki.

And all at once, the bonds that hold the Fox family together begin to fray.

Helen Garner's perfectly formed novels embody Melbourne's tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. Drawn on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, The Children's Bach is a beloved work that weighs the burdens of commitment against the costs of liberation.

A W&N Essential

  • Classification : General & Literary Fiction
  • Pub Date : FEB 29, 2024
  • Imprint : Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  • Page Extent : 176
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9781399606820
  • Price : INR 499
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Helen Garner

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.

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