The Season

'I'm trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we spend together before he turns into a man.' It's footy season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson Amby's under-16s team. She goes to every training session, shivering on the sidelines in her local park, swept up in the game's epic theatre. Here is a chance to connect with her youngest grandchild before he rushes headlong into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to be part of the community that gathers to watch its boys do battle, to gasp and cheer for the team as it fights for a place in the finals. The Season is part dispatch from the frontlines of boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often disappears under too bright a spotlight, and part personal celebration, as Garner rejoices in the unexpected riches of her later years and the quotidian joys of family life. The result is a heartfelt, generously funny and exuberant book from one of our greatest living writers.

Helen Garner was born in Geelong 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.