Joe Cinque’s Consolation

Winner Ned Kelly Award / Best True Crime 2005

Winner Australian Book Industry Award / Book of the Year 2004

A true story of death, grief and the law from the 2019 winner of the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

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.

‘Garner’s book is a writer’s profound response to a tragedy and to questions about human responsibility over time as well as at precise moments.’
The Age

‘This is a work of great passion and of countervailing humanity – a book of witness…’
Australian Book Review