I confess that I read This House of Grief by Helen Garner because Carrie Bradshaw in And Just Like That was reading it, and if it was good enough for Carrie, it was good enough for me. It’s all the rage at the moment, thanks to popping up in a celebrity book club and I’d also recently read about Helen Garner as a prominent Australian writer and thought I’d start here in sampling her writing.

The book is a personal account of attending the trial of Robert Farquharson, a working-class father from Geelong, about 50 miles from Melbourne, accused of deliberately drowning his three children in a murder-suicide that becomes just murder when he survives. It sounds all too sadly familiar – estranged husband is bitter at his separated wife for ending the marriage, keeping the house and the best car, having custody of the kids and starting a new relationship, and he decides to end it all and pay her back in the most awful way, by killing their children along with himself.

Garner unpicks this, wanting to make sure this is really the case, and that his defence of blacking out at the wheel after a coughing fit is not true (though even it doesn’t seem to explain why he didn’t do more to save the kids from drowning or seem more upset about it). She attends the trial day after day and it takes over her life, conversations with friends, and her ability to focus on, or think about, anything else.

It’s so well written that you feel that you are in the courtroom with her, can smell its smells, feel the heat, sense the grief of the family, and are in the conversations she has with fellow onlookers and journalists, for whom this is just a job.

It left me uneasy, as true crime does, as an intruder on someone else’s grief, in a story where everyone loses and the poor children’s terrible death is replayed and picked over again and again. But I can see why everyone’s talking about it.