The Turning

A masterfully created and critically acclaimed collection the biggest selling short story collection in Australia's history. In the 1980s Tim Winton made his mark with tough, spare stories about youth and promise, of early parenthood and the challenges of loyalty. Now, almost twenty years since his last collection, he returns to the form with seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are...
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A masterfully created and critically acclaimed collection the biggest selling short story collection in Australia's history. In the 1980s Tim Winton made his mark with tough, spare stories about youth and promise, of early parenthood and the challenges of loyalty. Now, almost twenty years since his last collection, he returns to the form with seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are turnings of all kinds changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives theyve made for themselves. Beautifully crafted, and as tender as they are confronting, these elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through. Always a writer of crystelline, luminous prose, [Winton's] lines of sinewy leanness achieve such clarity here that it seems one is reading line after line of perfect music. His unbounded humanity and his sympathy for his characters descend on them like grace as they struggle to salvage their lives.To read him is to be reminded not just of the possibilities of fiction but of the human heart.