This House Of Grief by Helen Garner

About the book: On the evening of Father’s Day, 2005, separated husband, Robert Farquharson, was driving his three young sons back to their mom’s house when the car veered off the road and plunged into a dam. 

Farquharson survived the crash, but his boys drowned. 

Was this a tragic accident, or an act of revenge? 

The court case that followed became a national obsession - a macabre parade of witnesses, family members, and the defendant himself, each forced to relive the unthinkable for an audience of millions.

In This House of Grief (originally published in 2014) (2024), celebrated writer Helen Garner tells the definitive and deeply absorbing story of it all, from crash to final verdict. Through a panoply of perspectives, including her own as a member of the public, Garner captures the exacting procedure and brutal spectacle of Australia’s criminal justice system. The result is a richly textured portrait of a man and his broken life, of a community wracked by tragedy, and of the long and torturous road to closure.

Considered a literary institution in Australia, Helen Garner’s incisive nonfiction evokes the keen eye of the New Journalists. Brisk, candid, and never dismissive of its flawed subjects, This House of Grief is a masterwork of literary journalism and a true crime classic, which examines just what we are capable of and how fiercely we hide it from ourselves.

This House of Grief is on Dua Lipa’s Book Club Pick for August 2025, The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and one of the Guardian‘s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

About the author: Helen Garner was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1942. She worked as a high school teacher, then as a freelance journalist. Since 1977, she has published novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the 2006 inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the 2016 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction, the 2019 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include This House of Grief, Monkey Grip and The Children’s Bach.