This House of Grief is a 2014 non-fiction work by the Australian writer Helen Garner. Subtitled "The story of a murder trial", its subject matter is the conviction for murder of a man who accused of driving his car into a dam resulting in the deaths of his three children.
On 4 September 2005 a car driven by Robert Farquharson left the road and crashed into a dam, resulting in the deaths of his three sons. He was convicted of their murder on 5 October 2007. Farquharson appealed the decision, and on 17 December 2009 the conviction was set aside and a new trial ordered
The epigram to the book is "this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief", a quotation from Hungarian poet Dezső Kosztolányi's Kornél Esti. The epigram is directed to the Supreme Court of Victoria.
In The Monthly, Ramona Koval wrote that the work was "devastating, utterly compelling".In an essay in "The Conversation" website the writer was of the opinion that Garner "fails to address the broader issues of gender inequality and male violence".In The Australian Peter Craven wrote that the book was "some kind of masterpiece and Garner creates, moment by moment, with a breathtaking suspension of judgment, the whirlwind that blows across every corner of this story like a hard rain that comes with the force of a desolation, sparing nothing.". Craven also noted that Garner had previously written about legal cases as "an old hand at using a novelist’s technique to create a pointillist image of a trial" in The First Stone and Joe Cinque's Consolation.In UK daily newspaper The Guardian Kate Clanchy wrote, "[…] the whole book feels final, elegiac – perhaps because for all the horror, it is so elegantly and calmly written; perhaps because This House of Grief completes so many arcs begun in Garner's previous works; perhaps because it is impossible to imagine it being done better".Awards and nominations
2015 shortlisted Indie Awards — Nonfiction2015 longlisted Stella Prize2015 shortlisted Kibble Literary Awards — Nita Kibble Literary Award2015 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) — Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year2015 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction2015 winner Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing — Best True Crime2015 shortlisted Colin Roderick Award2015 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Non-Fiction
