Cloudstreet: A Novel

by Tim Winton

Overview

From award-winning author Tim Winton comes an epic novel that regularly tops the list of best-loved novels in Australia.

After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united, and—until God seems to turn His back on their boy Fish—religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.

Change, hardship, and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering house called Cloudstreet. Over the next twenty years, they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognized as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton's sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250035516
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/26/2013
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	268,040
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	880L (what's this?)

About the Author

Tim Winton is widely considered one of the greatest living Australian writers. He has published twenty-four books, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.

Editorial Reviews

Winton is a one-man band of genius.” —Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times

“Cloudstreet gets you inside the very skin of postwar working-class Australians the way Joyce makes you feel like a turn-of-the-century Dubliner.” —Elizabeth Ward, The Washington Post

“Nothing short of magnificent...A wonderful read.” —Andrew Yule, Time Out (New York)

“One of my favorite novels.” —Nancy Pearl

From the Publisher

``Luck don't change, love,'' observes Sam Pickles to his daughter Rose. ``It moves.'' Considerations of fate and love underlie Winton's ( Shallows ) wry novel, set in Western Australia, about two families thrown together in the years following WW II. Sam Pickles earns a modest living mining guano for nitrate until he loses his hand in an accident. Fortunately, the family inherits a rambling old house--the Cloudstreet of the title--in which they can live, although they still lack cash. The dilemma is resolved with the sudden arrival of the rigid, God-fearing Lamb family, whom the rather libertine Pickles take in as boarders. Following the quirky, deeply etched members of these families--``flamin whackos,'' in Quick Lamb's description--as they forge bonds and undergo travails, Winton explores the haphazard nature of human existence with a quietly focused ferocity. Featuring lyrical passages and rapid-fire, minimally punctuated dialogue, this satiric, affectionate family saga is tragic and hilarious--and often both at once. Winton shows himself a worthy successor to his countryman Martin Boyd, who portrayed the Anglo-Australian society of previous generations. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Australian Winton's fifth novel is chock-full, depicting birth, death, resurrection, marriage, miscarriage, gambling, drunkenness, adultery, anorexia, depression, love, and joy. From 1944 to 1964, the Pickles and Lamb families share a large house in a suburb of Perth on the wrong side of the tracks. The Pickles own the house and are slothful, he a gambler with long streaks of bad luck, she often drunk and adulterous. The tenant Lambs are hard-working. After the latter open a successful grocery on the first floor of the house, the families' lives become intertwined, and home and hearth become an anchor. World War II, Australian politics, the Cuban missle crisis, and Kennedy's assassination take a backseat to their trials and final joy. Biblical imagery, a talking pig, a house that cracks its knuckles, a son who glows in the dark, and a mysterious black ``guardian angel'' add spice to a book whose language resonates and charms. Highly recommended for most fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92.-- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York

Library Journal

This marvelous postmodern novel of family life by bestselling Australian writer Winton (Minimum of Two, That Eye, the Sky, etc.) celebrates all the great traditional values in writing that is emphatically contemporary. As Fish Lamb, whose nature and tragedy shape the story, prepares to return to the river he has yearned for ever since he was saved from drowning as a small boy, two families, the Lambs and the Pickleses, picnicking on the riverbank, are celebrating a momentous decision in their joint lives. The two families—who are working-class and scarred by past failures, and who for 20 years have shared the enormous old house that the Pickleses inherited on Cloud Street—have overcome daunting spiritual, moral, and physical adversities to reach this point. The Pickles family—Sam, who has lost the fingers of one hand in an accident; Dolly, who was abused as a child by her sisters; and their three children—have been adversely affected by Sam's belief in luck ("the shifty shadow of God"). The Lambs, whose religious faith was lost when Fish, after being saved from drowning, turned out to be retarded, are hard- working mystics determined to survive. The house itself, as much a metaphor as a setting, is haunted—and is the least credible part of the novel—by malevolent ghosts and by an Aborigine angel who appears serendipitously. The families fight, suffer, teeter on the edge of disaster, but love—young Rosa Pickles and Quick Lamb marry—and the will to endure bring them through. Fish, always sensitive to the dangers surrounding them over the years, is finally able to return to the river where he can savor the families' "healing all the rest of hisjourney." One of those rare novels that warm the heart, as well as spark the imagination.

Kirkus Reviews