This week’s Reading Trail in support of ABC-RN’s imminent Top 100 Australian Books poll revisits Helen Garner’s appreciation of the work of Elizabeth Jolley . In this overview, published in the winter of 1983, Garner celebrates Jolley’s humour, her pathos, and the images she returns to, “so industrious but never threadbare”. Never cruel, Garner notes, “the bottom line, for Jolley, is love.”
Follow the trail to revisit Jolley’s own writing on writing in “Who Talks of Victory?” from 1987, and Sophie Laguna on Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (as well as Tim Winton and May Gibbs) in the first instalment of Meanjin’s “Australia in Three Books” series in 2016.
Voting for this year’s ABC Radio National Top 100 Australian Books poll will run from 31 August through to 1 October.
Elizabeth Jolley: An Appreciation, by Helen Garner
Who Talks of Victory?, by Elizabeth Jolley
Australia in Three Books, by Sofie Laguna
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