CLOUDSTREET

by TIM WINTON

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New softcover book, 576 pages. TV miniseries tie-in edition published 2011

Two rural families - the Pickles and the Lambs - flee to the city after separate catastrophes. They find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives again from scratch - and for twenty years, they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

Cloudstreet chronicles the lives of two working class Australian families who come to live together at One Cloud Street, over a period of twenty years, 1943 - 1963. Precipitated by separate personal tragedies, two families flee their rural livings to share a 'great continent of a house', Cloudstreet, in the Perth suburb of West Leederville. The two families are contrasts to each other; the Lambs find meaning in industry and in God’s grace; the Pickles, in luck. The Lambs’ God is a maker of miracles; the Pickles’ God is the ‘Shifty Shadow’ of fate. Though initially resistant to each other, their search and journey for meaning in life concludes with the uniting of the two families with many characters citing this as the most important aspect of their lives. As a novel, Cloudstreet is tightly structured, opening and ending with a shared celebratory family picnic - a joyous occasion which, ironically, is also the scene of Fish’s long sought-after death or return to the water. The novel is narrated effectively by flashback 'in the seconds it takes to die' by Fish Lamb, or the 'spiritual' omniscient Fish Lamb, free of his restricting retarded state. As such the novel gives a voice to social minorities, the Australian working class and the disabled.

Tim Winton's funny, sprawling saga is an epic novel of love and acceptance. It is a celebration of people, places and rhythms of life that has become one of Australia's favourite novels.

Awards for Cloudstreet

Winner - 1992 Deo Gloria Award

Winner - 1991 NBC Banjo Award for Literature

Winner -1991 Miles Franklin Award

Joint Winner - 1991 Western Australia Premier's Book Award - Fiction

About the Author

Tim Winton has published twenty books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-five 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.

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Cloudstreet by Tim Winton