Cloudstreet: A Novel
SynopsisPlot
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. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor.
Story
About this book
Cloudstreet follows two working-class families who end up sharing a large, run-down house in a suburb of Perth, Western Australia. The Pickles have inherited the property after a run of personal disasters, while the Lambs, a devout family recovering from their own misfortune, move in as tenants and open a small grocery shop on the ground floor to make ends meet. The arrangement is uneasy from the start.
Over roughly two decades the novel tracks both households as they cope with work, loss, love, and the ordinary business of getting through each day. Tim Winton writes in a loose, vernacular style shaped by Australian speech, and his sense of place draws on the river, suburbs, and coastal edges of Perth. The narration moves between many characters rather than settling on one.
The house gives the book its title and its centre. Divided between two families who share walls, a yard, and little else at first, it becomes the place where questions of luck, chance, and belonging are worked out in postwar Australia. Winton also lets the building carry an unsettled, faintly haunted atmosphere that the families never fully explain.
