Monkey Grip
Helen Garner
 The novel is set in Melbourne in the mid 1970s. Nora is a single parent with a stable job as a teacher, but she lives in an inner-city shared house, part of a bohemia of students, musicians, and actors ...and junkies. Nora falls in love with Javo, an actor and a junkie. She drifts away from him, he drifts away from her. The harder they pull away from each other, the tighter the monkey grip.