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, author of One Day'Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses.her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive.' New Yorker'On the page, Garner is uncommonly fierce, though this usually has the effect on me of making her seem all the more likeable. I relish her fractious, contrarian streak - she wears it as a chef would a bloody apron - even as I worry about what it would be like to have to face it down.

' Guardian'Garner's stories share characteristics of the postcard: they flash before us carefully recorded images that remind us of harsher realities not pictured. And like postcards they are economically written, a bit of conversation is transcribed, a memory recalled, an event noted, scenes pass as if viewed from a trainmomentarily, distinct and tantalizing in their beauty.'New York Times.