The Turning

Tim Winton's stunning collection of connected stories is about turnings of all kinds -- changes of heart, slow awakenings, nasty surprises and accidents, sudden detours, resolutions made or broken. Brothers cease speaking to each other, husbands abandon wives and children, grown men are haunted by childhood fears. People struggle against the weight of their own history and try to reconcile themselves to their place in the world. With extraordinary insight and tenderness, Winton explores the demons and frailties of ordinary people whose lives are not what they had hoped.

Set on a coastal stretch of Western Australia, The Turning ranges in time from the seventies to the present. A few characters appear in several stories, gradually revealing themselves and the sources of their obsessions and rage. Winton is a master at capturing the urgency of memory, the way an entire life can be shaped by one event deep in the past.

Yet these same broken lives often are illuminated and redeemed by nature, by the sheer magnificence of the Australian sky and sea. "Right now," says the narrator of one story, "I don't care what happens...In the hot northern dusk, the world suddenly gets big around us, so big we just give in and watch." In the presence of Tim Winton's immense talent, the reader, too, just gives in and listens.