The Latest Breaking News from Helen Garner

BOOKS: The Independent’s writers look back on the literary year and select the very best books to gift your loved ones this festive season

There are a number of good reasons you might want to read this little “nanna’s book about footy” from Helen Garner over the summer.

Judi Dench talking Shakespeare, conversations with bestsellers Marian Keyes and David Nicholls, and a deep dive into the day’s news with Independent journalists and leading thinkers – this year’s Hay Festival programme is fit to burst with unmissable events. Jessie Thompson picks the highlights

The novelist and nonfiction writer on her love of courtroom drama, the trials of cancel culture and why she wouldn’t have been a good psychoanalyst

Among next year’s highlights are debut fiction from Bri Lee, nonfiction from Peter Goldsworthy and a new novel from 2023 Miles Franklin winner Shankari Chandran

She's a 'precarious' academic who still does some acting on the side.

Max Easton’s novel Paradise Estate offers a variation on the share-house drama epitomised by Monkey Grip (1977), Helen Garner’s chronicle of communal living in Melbourne.

Thousands of Australian books have been found on a pirated dataset of ebooks, known as Books3, used to train generative AI. Richard Flanagan, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Tim Flannery are among the leading local authors affected – along, of course, with writers from around the world.

A descendant of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, this biographical second novel is set among the share houses and squats of a young artistic life