The Mushroom Tapes

The Mushroom Tapes brings together three renowned writers of true crime: Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein.

For this extraordinary book, the lone wolves became a team. Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein tracked Erin Patterson’s preliminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell and spent countless hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.

The Mushroom Tapes is a true crime book like no other, an unputdownable record of the writers’ private conversations about their impressions from inside the courtroom. They explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true crime genre, and all that remains unknowable about Erin Patterson.

If you read one book about how Erin Patterson was convicted of triple murder make it The Mushroom Tapes.

About the Authors

Chloe Hooper is the author of The Tall Man and The Arsonist, along with two acclaimed novels. Her most recent book is Bedtime Story.

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction. She was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2019. And in 2023 she was awarded the ASA Medal for her outstanding contribution to Australian literature.

Her works include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, The Spare Room, This House of Grief, The Season and three volumes of her diaries. She lives in Melbourne.

Sarah Krasnostein is a multi-award winning writer and critic. She is the best-selling author of The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer, the Quarterly Essay, Not Waving, Drowning, and On Peter Carey

The Trauma Cleaner is available in various translations. The Believer was named by The New Yorker as a Best Book of 2022.

She has won Walkley Awards for long form feature writing and arts criticism, and been awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Australian Book Industry Award for General Non-Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Prize for Non-Fiction at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Dobbie Literary Award. She was a finalist for the Wellcome Book Prize (UK), the National Biography Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Walkley Book Award and the Nib Literary Award. She holds a doctorate in criminal law and is admitted to legal practice in New York and Victoria.