The Turning: New Stories - Hardcover

Winton, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743276930 ISBN 13: 9780743276931

Publisher: Scribner, 2005

Synopsis

A collection of stories set in western Australia includes the stories of brothers who shun one another, ex-lovers who reunite to remember their incompatibility, and a man who returns to the site of a frightening childhood event.

About this title

Review:

The writing of Tim Winton has long been noted for its elegance, precision and keen insight into the human soul. With The Turning, we are given one of the most precise and satisfying distillations of the novelist's art, albeit in what has long been something of an unfashionable form: the short story. The form is often regarded by publishers as something of a commercial liability, even though many great writers (from Somerset Maugham to William Trevor) have excelled in shorter fiction. But Winton, as well as being one of the finest novelists Australia has ever produced, is also a master of the form. The seventeen overlapping tales here encapsulate some of the most insightful observations that he has given us.

What makes the stories so unusual is the fashion in which Winton has managed to find the unusual within the everyday--here, ordinary people are subjected to extraordinary pressures, and everything from middle-aged loss to youthful vacillations of the heart crafted with great skill.

Winton (who was born in Perth in Western Australia) has published fifteen books and has won a variety of literary prizes. The stories here can only add lustre to his reputation. Big World is the story of a friendship between two undergraduates who take on unsatisfactory jobs one frigid January, such as sluicing the blood from the floor of a local meat factory. The duo set off by car in pursuit of diversion, and we learn that neither is particularly lovable (particularly the eccentric Biggie); as the tale advances, the narrator learns to his cost that friendship comes at a price. This immensely involving piece is written in the kind of lambent prose that often aspires to the condition of poetry, despite the banality of the two young men's lives. Similarly, The Turning deals with trailer life, and its unhappy, unfulfilled working-class women are brilliantly characterised. Whatever your feelings about the short story form, you will be doing yourself a disservice to miss this collection. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

"As a collection of short stories [The Turning] is magnificent, but it also transcends its form and makes a breathtakingly beautiful and challenging novel." (Australian Bookseller+Publisher)

"Plot and prose combine to create what might just come close to being the perfect Australian novel." (The Herald Sun)

"[A] remarkable collection of interlinked short stories . . . a superbly balanced whole." (The Guardian)

"'To read [Winton] is to be reminded not just of the possibilities of fiction but of the human heart." (The Times)

"Listening to The Turning in Sydney traffic was like diving into the refreshing West Australian oceans that Winton describes with such passion. It wasn't hard to imagine the hum of passing traffic to be the wind or the ocean in a storm. The Turning translates easily to audiobook, albeit across a massive 10 discs. At that length, it's the perfect holiday book to be uploaded to an iPod and listened to at your leisure, or better yet, for the corrugated drive northward from Perth, which all West Australians do at one time or other, through the very country the book encapsulates. Winton's characters are brought to life with an accent that combines gruffness and comfort. The narrators – Humphrey Bower and Caroline Lee – alternate with the stories, which helps keep the momentum. The broad and gentle Australian accents of the story-tellers echo the dry, pastoral Australian feel of the stories themselves, highlighting the measured cadence of Winton's sentences. The end result is that each story, no matter how disquieting, becomes intimate and strangely beautiful, laden with dust and sea salt." (Limelight Magazine)

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0743276930
• ISBN 13: 9780743276931
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 321