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Monkey Grip

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Monkey Grip

By: Helen Garner
Narrated by: Helen Garner
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About this listen

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 (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Women's Fiction

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)
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Not really a story. just a snapshot of a few years in lived in Melbourne. I enjoyed this as a must read classic. There was no real plot. Just life meandering along. Helped that it was read by the author.

like reading a diary

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really enjoyed this snapshot into a life of a women in melbourne especially being read by the author was really special

I love helen

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Australia in the 70s. Young, naive, self-absorbed and very real. Helen captures it. An important book and an enjoyable one.

A moment in time

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this is one of my favourite books of all time. It is raw gritty and interesting with world. Developed characters. Can’t recommend highly enough.

gritty story great characters

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I loved this book… a wonderful snapshot of times past… memories of some of the Melbourne characters I knew. And anything Helen Garner writes is fabulous, and hearing her read it is just another treat.

Monkey Grip

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The documenting of a subculture in Melbourne 1970’s inner city is unflinchingly real yet poetic.

The glorious honesty of the writing

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Repetitive, no plot, self indulgent pap..garner should be embarrassed to have written this much less narrated it

The worst book I have ever read

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struggled to finish it. Hard to believe it made "Books that made us" ABC TV

Don't waste your time

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