It’s the story of two families, the Pickles and the Lambs, both beset by disaster but responding to it in different ways. I bet there’s many an Aussie author who groans in dismay to find his/her book released in the same year as a Winton, because he tends to blitz every award there is, with a corresponding impact on book sales.Ĭloudstreet is the book that made his reputation. Winton has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders (1994) and Dirt Music).

Which is really rather contrary of me because he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times – for Shallows, (1984) Cloudstreet, (1992) Dirt Music (2002) and the only one I’ve reviewed here, Breath (2009). It wasn’t my first Winton, that was That Eye, the Sky which I read in 1986, and I’ve read all Winton’s major novels, even though I’ve never really taken to his writing.

I first read Cloudstreet some time in the 1990s. I don’t want to provide content for lazy plagiarists. However, I have to be careful how I write this… Cloudstreet is set as a school text all over the country. They are so elegantly crafted, so beautifully illustrated and such a pleasure to handle! But I also wanted to revisit Cloudstreet because the book is now over 30 years old, and an Aussie classic.

But because the blogosphere and the rest of the media is awash with reviews of Eyrie, I jumped at the chance to do something different: I’ve been reading a new edition of Winton’s earlier work, the iconic Cloudstreet, now available in a sumptuous Folio Society edition. things I overheard as a kid.As everyone knows, Tim Winton has a new novel out this year: it’s called Eyrie, and of course I have a copy and will get round to reading it in due course. 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 author