The Turning

‘Beneath the immediate-impact surface robustness, these stories are threaded through with subtleties and oblique connections. For their masterly skills of organization and perception to be fully appreciated, they need to be read more than once. But Winton’s writing — vigorous, vivid, precise — is so good that you’d want to do that anyway’

Sunday Times

‘Vivid, elegiac and humorous, told in a relaxed prose that frequently strikes sparks. Unusually, I think, they bridge the gulf between short story and novel’

Daily Telegraph

‘Winton is a poet of baffled souls. . Always a writer of crystalline prose, his lines of sinewy leanness achieve such clarity here that it seems one is reading line after line of perfect music. His unbounded humanity and his sympathy for his characters descend on them like grace as they struggle to salvage their lives. To read him is to be reminded not just of the possibilities of fiction but of the human heart’

The Times

‘Winton has not only captured the tragic significance and the sheer wonder of one man’s difficult adolescence but of a town and, by extension, a whole country. Winton’s Cloudstreet is commonly considered the Great Australian Novel. “Big World”, which opens The Turning, could well be the great Australian short story’

List

‘In The Turning, Tim Winton returns to the short-story format after a series of novels, and a triumphant return it is. . A raw and urgent book, brimming with danger. . But there is nevertheless plenty of beauty in these haunting, finely written tales’

Literary Review

‘Tim Winton’s latest offering is a thrilling bundle of contradictions: a novel masquerading as a collection of short stories, an optimistic wallow in the doldrums of middle age. Full of violence and despair, it is also tender and poetic. . Enough to make first-time readers seek out Mr Winton’s earlier work and old hands re-read him all over again’

The Economist

‘Because of Winton’s huge talent for atmospheric storytelling The Turning is potent and compelling’

Financial Times

‘A vividly imagined and poetically executed piece of work, intense, lyrical and moving. Even with two Booker-nominated novels to his credit, Winton is a writer who continues to improve with each piece of work he publishes. . it’s no exaggeration to compare Winton’s achievement in conjuring landscape, its magnificence and hefty, threatening presence, to Hardy’s accomplishment in fashioning his Wessex or Emily Brontë her Yorkshire moors’

Independent on Sunday

‘Luminous. . impressive. . The novel gracefully peels away masks to reveal its characters’ vaulting ambitions, crippling insecurities and submerged traumas’

Time Out

‘Captivating. . The beauty of Winton’s work lies not in the hope to which some characters awaken, but in his skill at making grief palpable to readers who may be unscathed by the agonies that his characters suffer. . His stories artfully clarify life’s abrupt turns, but it is his prose that makes this work exceptional with its liveliness and flow’

Observer