It “gets you,” as one critic noted, “inside the very skin of post-war working-class Australians the way Joyce makes you feel like a turn-of-century Dubliner.” It carries the reader through the lives of the several members of the two families as they struggle with addictions, depressions, illnesses, losses and each other and as they celebrate their very survival through the recessions, World War II, urbanization, the supernatural, love and a serial killer. As those later works, Winton’s prose in Cloudstreet is mesmerizingly energetic and flowing, linked intimately to the physical environment and to the human spirit. It preceded Riders (1994), Dirt Music(2001)-both of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize-and Breath (2008). The families-the Lambs and the Pickles-share during those 20 years a home in the suburbs of Perth named Cloudstreet, which itself emerges magically as one of the main characters. It is the saga of two Western Australian, working class families from 1944 through 1964. Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s probably best known and best loved work, at least in Australia where it has been incorporated into the school curriculum and adapted for stage and television.
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