Helen Garner The Mushroom Tapes

Binding: Paperback

Date Published: 20 Nov 2025

In July 2023, in a quiet Australian country town, Erin Patterson - stay-at-home mother and true crime devotee - invited her husband's devoutly Christian family to lunch. Within days, three of her guests were dead and the fourth was in a coma. They had all been poisoned by death cap mushrooms.

Two years later, Patterson stood trial, accused of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. The court case gripped the nation and fascinated people all over the world.

Among those drawn into the drama were three renowned Australian writers: Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. Together, they joined the daily media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts and spent long days immersed in the case's sinister and complex themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.

The Mushroom Tapes is a true crime book like no other - a uniquely enlightening study of Erin Patterson and our collective obsession with her strange and terrible crime.

Helen Garner is widely recognised as one of Australia's greatest writers. She is the winner of the 2006 inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the 2016 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction, the 2019 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include This House of Grief, Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach and How To End A Story: Collected Diaries.
Chloe Hooper is an Australian author acclaimed for her compelling narratives in both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of A Child's Book of True Crime, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Literature, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire and Bedtime Story.
Sarah Krasnostein is the best-selling author of The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer, Not Waving, Drowning, and On Peter Carey. She has won the Victorian Prize for Literature and other major nonfiction awards and been shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. She holds a doctorate in criminal law and is admitted to practice law in New York and Victoria.

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