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Book Summary and Reviews of The Turning by Tim Winton

The Turning by Tim Winton

The Turning

New Stories

by Tim Winton

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  • Sep 2005, 336 pages
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About this book

Book 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.

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Reviews

Media 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.

This information about The Turning was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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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.

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Author Information

Tim Winton Author Biography

Photo: Denise Fitch

The preeminent Australian novelist of his generation, Tim Winton is the author of the bestselling novels Cloudstreet, The Riders, and Dirt Music, among many other books. He has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, and Breath) and has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.

Author Interview

Other books by Tim Winton at BookBrowse
  • Eyrie jacket
  • Dirt Music jacket

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