From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans — running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth — bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.Publishers Weekly``Luck don't change, love,'' observes Sam Pickles to his daughter Rose. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire. Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives.Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.Ĭhance, hardship and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet. The Lambs are industrious, united and – until God seems to turn his back on their boy Fish – religious. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday.Īfter two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. It has all the feels in a big Australian way.

If you’ve watched it, let me know what you think please!Ĭloudstreet gets the laughing while I am crying tick of approval. I suppose, I’m slightly worried they may not have done it justice and I don’t want this to tarnish the magic of Cloudstreet for me. It’s also a book that I’ve given to my Dad, and I’m pretty fussy about which books I gift to him! I am yet to watch the TV adaptation, despite having bought it when it first came out.

To me, Cloudstreet is uniquely Australian, quirks and all, and I love it, enough to have more than one copy of it. I first read it after watching the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club, back in the days when it was still named that, and Marieke had nominated it as one of her all time favourites. I’ve read most of Tim Winton’s books, the novels and the short story collections, and Cloudstreet remains my favourite.

Cloudstreet author