The Turning

Front Cover
Picador, 2004 - Fiction - 317 pages
In the 1980s Tim Winton made his mark with tough, spare stories about youth and promise, of early parenthood and the challenges of loyalty. Now, almost twenty years since his last collection, he returns to the form with seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they've made for themselves. Beautifully crafted, and as tender as they are confronting, these elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.

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About the author (2004)

Tim Winton was born in 1960 in Western Australia. He attended a Creative Writing Course at Curtin University in Perth, and it was there that he began his first novel, An Open Swimmer. It was entered for The Australian/Vogel Award in 1981 and won. With The Riders Winton made his first appearance on The Booker Prize shortlist in 1995. It didn't win the Booker but it did, however, win The Miles Franklin Award in 1992, to follow his first win of that award with Shallows in 1984. In addition The Riders won the best novel award in the South East Asia and South Pacific section of The Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1995. Tim Winton has also become the patron of the Tim Winton Award for Young Writers which is sponsored by the City of Subiaco in Western Australia.

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