Akira is a Japanese boy who was sent by his father to go to Australia for studying English and to broaden his eyes. The novel is actually a letter wrote from Akira, the main character, to Satoshi, talking about his experiences with his homestay family and friends when he was studying in Hobart. Garner is famous, iconic, controversial, a writer whose life powers much of her fiction and her non-fiction, including the famously autobiographical novel Monkey Grip (1977), the scandalous but compelling The First Stone (1995), a book ostensibly about a sexual harassment case at Melbourne University, and the brilliant Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004).We have started reading a novel called “The Spare Room”, which is written by Kathryn Lomer since a few weeks ago. The Spare Room is a difficult book to review and assess because of the static created by the author's backstory.

Family money means Nicola has the funds to support all this and further types of New-Age insanity. She chooses a maddening fairyland of hope and magnetic fields and enemas made from organic coffee. She won't do things the right way, the Helen way, the way of quiet acceptance, or grace or even brutal honesty. Nicola, readers will see, is dying, but she refuses to accept this. The facts, it must be said, support Helen's interpretation. To the frail and pain-soaked Nicola, the treatment is a final life-saving measure and the staff are angels. To pugnacious, healthy Helen the treatment is a shonky, idiotic, painful, humiliating and stupid waste of time and the dishevelled institute staff are charlatans or worse. It opens with narrator Helen, a Melbourne writer well past middle age, living alone next to her daughter and grandchildren, bustling about getting her spare room ready for the arrival of Nicola, a sixtysomething bohemian friend from Sydney who has stage-four cancer. The Spare Room is a short book, one that can easily be read in a sitting. It is a private, domestic, intimate battle, one version of a painful story that is being played out inside many Australian homes. Helen Garner's new book is about Nicola, a woman who is fighting terminal cancer, and Helen, her devoted but enraged carer. 'She fought and fought until she couldn't fight it any more,' Lynette's sister said. The group do the walk every year in honour of this woman.

I met Lynette's mum, her niece, her sister, her brother-in-law. ' In the blank space organisers had left one teenager had written: 'My mum, my grandma, my great-gran Nana Ray.' I spent most of the walk next to a family with photographs of a young woman called Lynette on their backs. Hundreds of participants, including me, had signs on their back that said, 'I'm doing this for.

The spare room novel