The Turning: Book summary and reviews of The Turning by Tim Winton

The Turning Summary

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.

The Turning Reviews

'These stories convey the quiet authority of a man at ease in a fictional territory he can legitimately call his own...a writer whose work is informed by an intimate and unsentimental connection with a particular landscape and the lives it sustains.' - The Guardian, London.
'Winton reveals a wide but finely turned swath of simmering inner lives; the sweetness of these stories, as well as their sharp bite, feels earned and real. - PW Starred Review.

Comment: Tim Winton (Cloudstreet, Dirt Music etc) is a household name in his native Australia, where his books, usually set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, are pretty much permanent fixtures on the bestseller lists. However, he has yet to achieve wide recognition in the USA.

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The Turning Reader Reviews

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Rated of 5 by roamingreader
The Turning
The Turning (2004), Tim Winton, is an obvious must-read. I'm a year 12 student and feel that this book should be included in every year 11 or 12 TEE English course around Australia. It's so insightful and enlightening, it makes a reader hungry for more. The way Winton has used conventions to create unity throughout the book is just magnificent. I found the lack of dialogue in this text refreshing, it was the first novel i had read that didn't have quotation marks. There is so much for a student to learn about english when reading this book, I honestly feel it was a privilege that i had the chance to study it.

Tim Winton Author Biography

Tim Winton, who grew up on the coast of Western Australia, has been called the best-loved Australian novelist of his generation. In 1982, his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel National Literary Award, and he has been a full-time writer ever since. Winton has won Australia's most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, on three occasions, and The Riders and Dirt Music were both nominated for the coveted Booker Prize. In addition to receiving accolades for his children's stories, a number of Winton's fictional works have been successfully adapted for the stage and screen, including That Eye the Sky, In the Winter Dark, and Cloudstreet. The novel Breath, published in May 2008,...

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