Author of cloudstreet5/20/2023 It is this collection of souls, and the novel’s exclusive concentration on its characters that make Cloudstreet such a page-turning read. Events leading up to the families’ occupation of ‘Cloudstreet’- the old haunted house of their residence- are made known with a fair amount of clarity to the reader, and the ghosts’ influence on the souls within is a central theme of the tale. Spanning several decades from the mid-1930s in Western Australia, the two families- each with their own ever-present demons and idiosyncrasies- are thrown together in an unlikely, albeit legitimate setting. The story weaves tightly around two families- the Pickles and the Lambs (a piece of otherwise-ridiculousness for which Winton manages to draw absolute sympathy). Mixing thought-text around this unusual technique creates a wonderful flow, allowing the reader to take up their own residence inside his masterfully drawn characters. The language of Cloudstreet is dense, yet flowing, as Winton eschews formal apostrophe-style dialogue for simple hyphens to denote spoken-out-loud sentences. Although I’m all for a bit of literary liberty-taking, the grammatical purist in me would never have expected to be so taken with a novel that shows such disregard for basic punctuation as Cloudstreet by prolific Australian author Tim Winton.
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