-
The Children's Bach
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 3 hrs and 20 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $16.00
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
A captivating and deeply personal novel from one of Australia’s most respected authors.
Athena and Dexter live a happy but insular life, bound by routine and the care of their young sons. When Elizabeth, an old friend from Dexter’s university days, turns up with her much younger sister, Vicki, and her lover, Philip, she brings an enticing world to their doorstep. And Athena finds herself straining at the confines of her life.
Helen Garner portrays her characters with a clear eye for their dreams, their insecurities and their deep humanity in this intimate and engaging short novel, which was first published in 1984.
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
This House of Grief
- The Story of a Murder Trial
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Kate Hood
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This House of Grief is a heartbreaking audiobook by one of Australia's most admired authors. Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain.
-
-
Riveting
- By MLM SoCal on 11-05-23
By: Helen Garner
-
Yellow Notebook
- Diaries Volume I 1978-1987
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I spans a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip.
-
-
Helen Garner offers a treasure trove of everyday life and experiences.
- By Deborah Lathrop on 01-04-21
By: Helen Garner
-
How to End a Story
- Diaries 1995-1998
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time, she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship—and the truth of her own self.
By: Helen Garner
-
Monkey Grip
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
MG
- By Amazon Customer on 08-08-22
By: Helen Garner
-
The Spare Room
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Heather Bolton
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Spare Room tells a story of compassion, humour and rage. The two women - one skeptical, one stubbornly serene - negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's bizarre therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale.
-
-
I liked this.
- By Carol on 04-20-12
By: Helen Garner
-
Father and Son
- A Memoir
- By: Jonathan Raban
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In June 2011, just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban was sitting down to dinner with his daughter when he found he couldn’t move his knife to his plate. Later that night, at the hospital, doctors confirmed what all had suspected: that he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became stable, Raban embarked on an extended stay at a rehabilitation center. Woven into this book is an account of a second battle, one that his own father faced in the trenches during World War II.
-
-
Beautiful writing, great personal account of World War II
- By Gordon on 11-19-23
By: Jonathan Raban
-
This House of Grief
- The Story of a Murder Trial
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Kate Hood
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This House of Grief is a heartbreaking audiobook by one of Australia's most admired authors. Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain.
-
-
Riveting
- By MLM SoCal on 11-05-23
By: Helen Garner
-
Yellow Notebook
- Diaries Volume I 1978-1987
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I spans a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip.
-
-
Helen Garner offers a treasure trove of everyday life and experiences.
- By Deborah Lathrop on 01-04-21
By: Helen Garner
-
How to End a Story
- Diaries 1995-1998
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time, she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship—and the truth of her own self.
By: Helen Garner
-
Monkey Grip
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
MG
- By Amazon Customer on 08-08-22
By: Helen Garner
-
The Spare Room
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Heather Bolton
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Spare Room tells a story of compassion, humour and rage. The two women - one skeptical, one stubbornly serene - negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's bizarre therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale.
-
-
I liked this.
- By Carol on 04-20-12
By: Helen Garner
-
Father and Son
- A Memoir
- By: Jonathan Raban
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In June 2011, just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban was sitting down to dinner with his daughter when he found he couldn’t move his knife to his plate. Later that night, at the hospital, doctors confirmed what all had suspected: that he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became stable, Raban embarked on an extended stay at a rehabilitation center. Woven into this book is an account of a second battle, one that his own father faced in the trenches during World War II.
-
-
Beautiful writing, great personal account of World War II
- By Gordon on 11-19-23
By: Jonathan Raban
-
Day
- A Novel
- By: Michael Cunningham
- Narrated by: Julianne Moore
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, is living vicariously through a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart.
-
-
The writing is lovely.
- By D. W. Trimm on 12-01-23
-
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
- A Novel
- By: James McBride
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
-
-
Multiple Stories Obfuscate Narrative
- By Stephnsea on 08-12-23
By: James McBride
-
The Pole
- By: J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: Colin Mace
- Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Exacting yet unpredictable, pithy yet complex, J. M. Coetzee’s The Pole tells the story of Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a vigorous, extravagantly white-haired pianist and interpreter of Chopin who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish Spanish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his concert in Barcelona. Although Beatriz, a married woman, is initially unimpressed by Wittold and his “gleaming dentures,” she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into his world.
-
-
Sad but beautiful
- By federico on 05-28-24
By: J. M. Coetzee
-
So Late in the Day
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Claire Keegan
- Length: 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude - and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.
-
-
This Audible is not the full Kindle/Book version.
- By Mary F. on 11-26-23
By: Claire Keegan
-
Wifedom
- Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life
- By: Anna Funder
- Narrated by: Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood, Jane Slavin
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue. "I’ve always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humor, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.
-
-
Intriguingly compelling!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-06-23
By: Anna Funder
-
Absolution
- A Novel
- By: Alice McDermott
- Narrated by: Jesse Vilinsky, Rachel Kenney
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own, inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.
-
-
Hung in there for 2 1/2 hours but had to return it
- By Jackie in MI on 11-14-23
By: Alice McDermott
-
Blackouts
- A Novel
- By: Justin Torres
- Narrated by: Ozzie Rodriguez, Torian Brackett
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay—playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized—has a project to pass along. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried.
-
-
Disappointed
- By P. Thurman on 09-16-24
By: Justin Torres
-
The House of Doors
- By: Tan Twan Eng
- Narrated by: David Oakes, Louise-Mai Newberry
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert’s, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings—and the freedom to travel with Gerald.
-
-
Great, but no “Garden”
- By Susan on 10-30-23
By: Tan Twan Eng
-
Shuggie Bain
- By: Douglas Stuart
- Narrated by: Angus King
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a wayward path: She is Shuggie’s guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good - her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor.
-
-
There’s far too much real pain and sadness in the world to spend any time listening to this tale of woe
- By SuperShopper on 02-18-21
By: Douglas Stuart
-
Liliana's Invincible Summer
- A Sister's Search for Justice
- By: Cristina Rivera Garza
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend.
-
-
A True Story Artistically Written
- By Josie on 08-31-24
-
The Family Upstairs
- A Novel
- By: Lisa Jewell
- Narrated by: Tamaryn Payne, Bea Holland, Dom Thornburn
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gifted musician Clemency Thompson is playing for tourists on the streets of Southern France when she receives an urgent text message. Her childhood friend, Lucy, is demanding her immediate return to London. It’s happening, says the message. The baby is back. Libby Jones was only six months old when she became an orphan. Now 25, she’s astounded to learn of an inheritance that will change her life. A gorgeous, dilapidated townhouse in one of London’s poshest neighborhoods has been held in a trust for her all these years. Now, it’s hers.
-
-
Did Not Disappoint... I LOVE LISA JEWELL
- By Tawny on 11-06-19
By: Lisa Jewell
-
Too Close
- A Novel
- By: Natalie Daniels
- Narrated by: Clara Salaman, Sara Stewart
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Working as a dedicated forensic psychiatrist for many years, Emma is not shocked so easily. Then she is assigned to work with Connie, a wife and mother accused of a despicable crime. Connie is suffering from dissociative amnesia - or at least seems to be. Now it is up to Emma to decide whether Connie can stand trial for her sins. But there is something about Connie that inexorably pulls Emma into her orbit. Too Close is a masterfully written riveting listen about the powerful - yet dangerous - closeness between women.
-
-
Absolutely worth it!
- By PollyAnna2 on 09-17-19
By: Natalie Daniels
Critic reviews
"This is the power of Garner’s writing. She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all." (The Australian)
"Garner wears her mastery lightly – the novel never draws undue attention to its own modernist tricks. Unfolding, as the title suggests, like a halting piece of music, its effects are subtle and unexpected." (Harper's Bazaar)