Cosmo Cosmolino : From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize - Helen Garner

Garner is a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses' NEW YORKER'A great, strange novel by a very great Australian writer' SYDNEY REVIEW OF BOOKS'So exact and vigorous, so full of creative energy' INDEPENDENTThe big, communal households of 1970s Melbourne have long gone. Now, Janet slopes around her run-down house, working hard to forget the noise and happiness it once contained. There are doors she can't bear to open, walls she can't bear to paint - and then there are the lodgers moving into its rooms. Ray, a born-again Christian, hides from his own dark past in the pages of his little black book. But Maxine, ecstatic about spells, auras and angels, has been looking for a sign - and reckons Ray must be it. As the three settle down together, eating separately and randomly and failing to live as a real household, a strange balance of forces begins to wash over Janet's home. First published in 1992, Cosmo Cosmolino is a carefully structured book about wildly unstructured lives from one of Australia's greatest writers. A rich, radical work of three linked stories, it asks how we find meaning in art, faith, home and each other. A W&N Essential