Back under the Norfolk pines gulls bickered on the grass and fought for the scraps of uneaten lunches that schoolkids had thrown there. Fishing boats were coming in along the breakwater for the night, their diesels throbbing like blood. She itched in her awful woollen bathing suit and watched her brothers and a whole mob of other kids chucking bombies off the end of the jetty in the bronze evening light. (Apr.Rose Pickles knew something bad was going to happen. Winton shows himself a worthy successor to his countryman Martin Boyd, who portrayed the Anglo-Australian society of previous generations. Featuring lyrical passages and rapid-fire, minimally punctuated dialogue, this satiric, affectionate family saga is tragic and hilarious-and often both at once. 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. The dilemma is resolved with the sudden arrival of the rigid, God-fearing Lamb family, whom the rather libertine Pickles take in as boarders. Fortunately, the family inherits a rambling old house-the Cloudstreet of the title-in which they can live, although they still lack cash.
Sam Pickles earns a modest living mining guano for nitrate until he loses his hand in an accident. ``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. 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.Publishers Weekly``Luck don't change, love,'' observes Sam Pickles to his daughter Rose. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. 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. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire. 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.
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