"A celebration of family life in the context of the thousand natural shocks that it is heir to in modern times." -Book World
Athena and Dexter Fox lead a contended family life. Dexter is gregarious and opinionated. Athena runs an ordered household. They live in Bunker Street with their sons, Arthur and Billy. Billy's autism is a focus for their attention and efforts, yet life is fairly peaceful.
But the arrival of Dexter's old friend Elizabeth, with her three charismatic companions, reveals the existence of a different world. One in which contingency and choice play a far greater role. The collision between these worlds will test everything that has held the Fox family together.
In this powerful story, painted on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, Helen Garner acknowledges the magnitude of everyday decisions and their consequences.
The Children's Bach is Garner's second novel. It won the SA Premier's Literary Award. First published in 1984, to critical acclaim, it has never before been available in the United States.
Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays, and non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. In 2016 she won a prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for her non-fiction. Her book of essays, Everywhere I Look, won the 2017 Indie Book Award.
Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and is currently a MacArthur Fellow.
Industry 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 Garner's 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 lightly-the 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.' * Harper's *
`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 Children's 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 *
