How to End a Story

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- This collection of diaries captures Garner's internal and external life: friendships, travel, heartbreak, writing struggles and unexpected joys. Her voice is unguarded, restless, meticulous – always tuned to the small, but telling, details. She shows how days bleed into years, how questions linger, how endings rarely feel neat. While the structure can feel fragmentary, the effect is cumulative: a haunting work that archives time, self and the slow art of noticing. Steve

‘The real value of this collection is the opportunity it affords us to see the domestic, ordinary, everyday world through Garner’s eyes.’ * Washington Post * ‘This diary begins by registering what is ordinary, how days are, what it is like to be a writer, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a citizen of Melbourne.’ * Colm Tóibín * ‘I revere Helen Garner’s writing, and it’s in her diaries that she’s at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best.’ * Nigella Lawson * ‘What a wonderful writer. Her prose is spare and beautiful...There are very few writers that I admire more.’ * David Nicholls * ‘A voice of great honesty and energy.’ * Anne Enright * ‘Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest, and economical.’ * New York Times Book Review * ‘Garner’s honesty and her refusal to take things at face value, even when she cannot see what’s right before her eyes, give her work enormous power…Even if you already know her work, I think you’ll devour the diaries.’ * Washington Independent Review of Books * ‘Very well might be the finest literary diaries since Virginia Woolf’s…Told with devastating honestly, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, How to End a Story offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.’ * Daunt Books [UK] * ‘These three volumes of Garner’s diaries, which span from 1978 to 1998, shows the Australian writer grappling with the vicissitudes of daily life: aging, big loves, creative and professional elations and frustrations, housekeeping, literary world rivalries, everyday fashion, thorny friendships, and making art. She thinks better than almost anyone.’ * W Magazine * ‘A devastating and engrossing portrait of passion, artistic conundrums, motherhood, rage, resignation... leaves you drunk with awe.’ * Maria Semple * ‘Every single page contains a passage of such distilled acuity and brilliance, it leaves you half drunk with exhilaration . . . These are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s.’ * Rachel Cooke, Observer * ‘The great Australian writer’s masterpiece . . . As propulsive and thrilling as any domestic noir.’ * The Times * ‘With sharp eyes and ears, Garner is a recording angel at life’s secular apocalypses.’ * James Wood, New Yorker * ‘Entrancing. I will return to these diaries for the rest of my days.’ * Charlotte Wood *