Monkey Grip Audiobook By Helen Garner cover art

Monkey Grip

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Monkey Grip

By: Helen Garner
Narrated by: Helen Garner
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$8.99/mo. after 3 months. Cancel anytime. Offer ends July 5, 2026 at 11:59pm PT.

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Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love - Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends.

Helen Garner’s gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece - the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs and sex.

When Nora falls in love with Javo, she is caught in the web of his addiction; and as he moves between loving her and leaving, between his need for her and promises broken, Nora’s life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go.

©1977 Helen Garner. Introduction copyright Charlotte Wood 2018 (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Contemporary Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Women's Fiction
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Critic reviews

"This is the power of Garner’s writing. She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life..." (The Australian)

"Her use of language is sublime." (Scotsman)

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This book was well suited for narration by the author. It has a real sense of time and place. There is not a great deal of plot, per se, so that makes it difficult to stay focused on how the events that do unfold are occurring. I thought the author had some beautiful prose and dialogue throughout the book.

MG

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