Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

SUN poured careless into the quiet yard where vegetables teemed in the earth and fruit hung, where a scarfaced pig sang sweetly at the sky and a small congregation amassed in the light. Beneath the ancient mulberry tree whose blood stained the soil around her, a square little woman unpegged and folded a tent, taking it corner to corner, minding its brittle, rimed fabric, smacking the dust from it. Another woman stepped forward, tottering a little. She crossed the long gash in the ground where yesterday there’d been a fence, and she took a corner of the tent herself. The little boxy woman and the big blowsy woman folded end to end till the tent was a parcel that they hefted to their shoulders across the greensmelling grass, and then they went inside the big old house whose door stood open, pressed back by the breeze they made in passing.

Tim Winton was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1960. He has lived in France, Ireland, and Greece, and currently lives in Western Australia with his wife and three children. He began publishing his fiction as a teenager and his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian / Vogel Award in 1981. Since then he has won the Miles Franklin (twice), the Banjo Prize, the Deo Gloria Award, and the Wilderness Society Environment Award. in 1995 his novel The Riders was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tim Winton’s work is published in twelve languages and has been successfully adapted for stage, screen, and radio. His most recent novel, Dirt Music, confirms his status as the preeminent Australian novelist of his generation.

Look for Tim Winton’s emotionally charged Dirt Music —now available from Scribner.