‘A groundbreaking Australian narrative irresistible combination of the domestic and the mythic.’ Thomas Keneally ‘ Cloudstreet is a comic, poignant and intelligent tour de force.’ Jim Crace

if you have not met these characters, this generous community, these tragedies, the humour. ‘If you have not read Cloudstreet, your life is diminished.

‘One of the great masterpieces of world fiction.’ Philip Hensher It pulses with a sense of wonder and shines with the clear light of truth.’ Robert Drewe ‘This is that rare book, a novel of both heart and intellect. 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. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.Ĭhance, hardship and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet. The Lambs are industrious, united and – until God seems to turn his back on their boy Fish – religious. things I overheard as a kid.Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised 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.Īfter two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The novel came out of “a collection of incidents, a few little images and a vague idea. ‘Cloudstreet’ is dedicated to Sam and Sadie Mifflin and Olive and Les Winton, his two sets of grandparents, whose stories went into generating ‘Cloudstreet’ (one grandparent retired to the backyard to live in a tent, like his character Oriel Lamb). But he was delighted to hear of his second win (his first Miles Franklin went to his novel ‘Shallows’ in 1984). Winton couldn’t attend the Miles Franklin award presentation in Sydney yesterday because he was in the middle of a tour promoting the release of ‘Cloudstreet’ in the United States. It was the Disneyland version, of course, not the real Swiss mountain. He was, in fact, sitting in the Candy Cane Inn in Anaheim, California, and gazing at the Matterhorn.

Winton said by phone this week that he was again turning his back on restraint and looking at the totally unexpected.

Cloudstreet book review