How to End a Story

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025

Helen Garner’s acclaimed three volumes of diaries are collected here in one sumptuous book. Spanning two decades—from the publication of her lightning-rod debut novel in the late 70s, to the throes of a consuming affair in the late 80s, and the messiness and pain of a disintegrating marriage in the late 90s—the diaries reveal the life of one of the world’s greatest writers.

Devastatingly honest and disarmingly funny, How to End a Story is a portrait of loss, betrayal, and the sheer force of a woman’s anger—but also of hard work and resilience, moments of hope and joy, the immutable ties of motherhood, and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, The Season and her diaries, the collected volume of which won the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize.

‘The real value of this collection is the opportunity it affords us to see the domestic, ordinary, everyday world through Garner’s eyes.’ Washington Post

‘I revere Helen Garner’s writing, and it’s in her diaries that she’s at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best.’ Nigella Lawson

‘What a wonderful writer. Her prose is spare and beautiful, her stories are truthful and touching. There are very few writers that I admire more.’ David Nicholls

‘Very well might be the finest literary diaries since Virginia Woolf’s…Told with devastating honestly, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, How to End a Story offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.’ Daunt Books (UK)