Joe Cinque’s Consolation

Helen Garner

May 2022 · Bolinda · Narrated by Helen Garner

About this audiobook

In October 1997, a clever young law student at the Australian National University made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests – most of them students – had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is an audiobook about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as ‘evil’ and explores conscience, culpability and the battered ideal of duty of care. It is a masterwork from one of Australia's greatest writers. Now a Major Motion Picture www.joecinque.com.au

About the author

Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong and educated at the University of Melbourne. She worked as a high school teacher until her first novel Monkey Grip was published in 1977. It was an instant success, winning a National Book Council award in 1978 and becoming a film in 1982. Since then she has written full-time, publishing novels, short stories, essays, journalism and long-form non-fiction. In 2006, Garner was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature, in 2016 the international Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, in 2019 the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and in 2020 the Lloyd O’Neil Award for Services to the Australian Book Industry at the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA). Most recently, Garner was awarded the 2023 ASA Medal by the Australian Society of Authors for her outstanding contribution to Australian culture.