Tim Winton

Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire. Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans -- running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth -- bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.

A Novel

Cloudstreet

Falling under the spell of an enigmatic extreme-sports surfer, a thrill-seeking pair of western Australian adolescents is initiated into a world of high-stakes adventures and dangerous boundary testing involving such activities as swimming in storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs.

Breath

Dirt music

Set on a coastal stretch of Western Australia, Tim Winton's stunning collection of connected stories is about turnings of all kinds -- changes of heart, slow awakenings, nasty surprises and accidents, sudden detours, resolves made or broken. Brothers cease speaking to each other, husbands abandon wives and children, grown men are haunted by childhood fears. People struggle against the weight of their own history and try to reconcile themselves to their place in the world. With extraordinary insight and tenderness, Winton explores the demons and frailties of ordinary people whose lives are not what they had hoped.

Stories

The Turning

Shepherd's Hut

Tom Keely's reputation is in ruins. And that's the upside. Divorced and unemployed, he's lost faith in everything precious to him. Holed up in a grim highrise, cultivating his newfound isolation, Keely looks down at a society from which he's retired hurt and angry. He's done fighting the good fight, and well past caring. But even in his seedy flat, ducking the neighbours, he's not safe from entanglement. All it takes is an awkward encounter in the lobby. A woman from his past, a boy the likes of which he's never met before. Two strangers leading a life beyond his experience and into whose orbit he falls despite himself. What follows is a heart-stopping, groundbreaking novel for our times - funny, confronting, exhilarating and haunting. Inhabited by unforgettable characters, Eyrie asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing. Longlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award 'From the opening pages.... You know you are in the hands of a master...' Weekend Australian

Eyrie

A boy named Abel grows up loving the sea and develops an enduring relationship with a large grouper that inspires him to save his homestead

A Contemporary Fable

Blueback

'I grew up on the world's largest island.' This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton's beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how this unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. For over thirty years, Winton has written novels in which the natural world is as much a living presence as any character. What is true of his work is also true of his life: from boyhood, his relationship with the world around him - rockpools, seacaves, scrub and swamp - was as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets of the south-east, walking in the high rocky desert fringe, diving at Ningaloo Reef, bobbing in the sea between sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, with its rhythms, its dangers, its strange sustenance, and learned to see landscape as a living process. Island Homeis the story of how that relationship with the Australian landscape came to be, and how it has determined his ideas, his writing and his life. It is also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet. Much more powerfully than a political idea, or an economy, Australia is a physical entity. Where we are defines who we are, in ways we too often forget to our detriment, and the country's. Wise, rhapsodic, exalted - Island Homeis not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country makes us who we are. 'Tim Winton's delicately meandering new collection of writing about place and being again raises literature's repeated assertion: in the face of the ineffable the only valid response is an aesthetic one . . . Island Homeis a beautiful example of that aesthetic response to the glory and the mystery of nature.' William Yeoman, the West Australian

Island Home

Fred Scully searches for his pregnant wife, who disappears without an explanation, leaving him with Billy, his seven-year-old daughter

Riders

Fierce and lyrical, The Shepherd's Hut by Tim Winton is a story of survival, solitude and unlikely friendship. Most of all it is about what it takes to keep hope alive in a parched and brutal world. For years Jaxie Clackton has dreaded going home. His beloved mum is dead, and he wishes his dad was too, until one terrible moment leaves his life stripped to nothing. No one ever told Jaxie Clackton to be careful what he wishes for. And so Jaxie runs. There’s just one person in the world who understands him, but to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands of Western Australia. It is a place that harbours criminals and threatens to kill those who haven't reckoned with its hot, waterless vastness. This is a journey only a dreamer – or a fugitive – would attempt. 'A page-turning heartbreaker' Emma Donoghue, author of Room.

The Shepherd's Hut

Dönüs

Thirteen-year-old Lockie, an Australian surfer, is happier riding the waves than he is trying to cope with being popular and in love.

Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo

'Eclectic and impassioned, a collection that affirms the power of the written word' Observer The Boy Behind the Curtain is a portrait of a life, a place and a man. In this deeply personal collection of true stories and essays Tim Winton shows how moments from his childhood and life growing up have shaped his views on class, faith, fundamentalism, the environment, and - most pressingly - how all his experiences have made him a writer. From unexpected links between car crashes and faith, surfing and writing, to the story of his upbringing in the changing Australian landscape, The Boy Behind the Curtain is an impassioned, funny, joyous, astonishing collection of memories, and Winton's most personal book to date.

Notes From an Australian Life

The Boy Behind the Curtain

The Screenplay

'Being a copper's son, I've always got one eye out for trouble. I can't help it. But I don't go looking for it anymore.' In Tim Winton's fiction, chaos shapes the lives of his characters. So too Winton's own life. The extraordinarily powerful true stories that make up The Boy Behind the Curtaintake us behind the scenes, revealing the accidents, both serendipitous and traumatic, that have influenced his view of life and fuelled his distinctive artistic vision. By turns impassioned, funny, joyous, astonishing, this is Winton's most personal book to date, an insight into the man who's held us enthralled for three decades and helped us reshape our view of ourselves. Behind it all, from risk-taking youth to surprise-averse middle age, has been the crazy punt of staking everything on becoming a writer.

Tim Winton

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