Product Description

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. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire.

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. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55525 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743234412
• BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From Publishers Weekly
"Luck don't change, love," observes Sam Pickles to his daughter Rose. "It moves." Considerations of fate and love underlie Winton's ( Shallows ) wry novel, set in Western Australia, about two families thrown together in the years following WW II. Sam Pickles earns a modest living mining guano for nitrate until he loses his hand in an accident. Fortunately, the family inherits a rambling old house--the Cloudstreet of the title--in which they can live, although they still lack cash. The dilemma is resolved with the sudden arrival of the rigid, God-fearing Lamb family, whom the rather libertine Pickles take in as boarders. Following the quirky, deeply etched members of these families--"flamin whackos," in Quick Lamb's description--as they forge bonds and undergo travails, Winton explores the haphazard nature of human existence with a quietly focused ferocity. Featuring lyrical passages and rapid-fire, minimally punctuated dialogue, this satiric, affectionate family saga is tragic and hilarious--and often both at once. Winton shows himself a worthy successor to his countryman Martin Boyd, who portrayed the Anglo-Australian society of previous generations.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Australian Winton's fifth novel is chock-full, depicting birth, death, resurrection, marriage, miscarriage, gambling, drunkenness, adultery, anorexia, depression, love, and joy. From 1944 to 1964, the Pickles and Lamb families share a large house in a suburb of Perth on the wrong side of the tracks. The Pickles own the house and are slothful, he a gambler with long streaks of bad luck, she often drunk and adulterous. The tenant Lambs are hard-working. After the latter open a successful grocery on the first floor of the house, the families' lives become intertwined, and home and hearth become an anchor. World War II, Australian politics, the Cuban missle crisis, and Kennedy's assassination take a backseat to their trials and final joy. Biblical imagery, a talking pig, a house that cracks its knuckles, a son who glows in the dark, and a mysterious black "guardian angel" add spice to a book whose language resonates and charms. Highly recommended for most fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
This marvelous postmodern novel of family life by bestselling Australian writer Winton (Minimum of Two, That Eye, the Sky, etc.) celebrates all the great traditional values in writing that is emphatically contemporary. As Fish Lamb, whose nature and tragedy shape the story, prepares to return to the river he has yearned for ever since he was saved from drowning as a small boy, two families, the Lambs and the Pickleses, picnicking on the riverbank, are celebrating a momentous decision in their joint lives. The two families--who are working-class and scarred by past failures, and who for 20 years have shared the enormous old house that the Pickleses inherited on Cloud Street--have overcome daunting spiritual, moral, and physical adversities to reach this point. The Pickles family--Sam, who has lost the fingers of one hand in an accident; Dolly, who was abused as a child by her sisters; and their three children--have been adversely affected by Sam's belief in luck (``the shifty shadow of God''). The Lambs, whose religious faith was lost when Fish, after being saved from drowning, turned out to be retarded, are hard- working mystics determined to survive. The house itself, as much a metaphor as a setting, is haunted--and is the least credible part of the novel--by malevolent ghosts and by an Aborigine angel who appears serendipitously. The families fight, suffer, teeter on the edge of disaster, but love--young Rosa Pickles and Quick Lamb marry--and the will to endure bring them through. Fish, always sensitive to the dangers surrounding them over the years, is finally able to return to the river where he can savor the families' ``healing all the rest of his journey.'' One of those rare novels that warm the heart, as well as spark the imagination. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

One grand "nugget in the webbing"
The Los Angeles Times Book Review states "Winton is a one-man band of genius."

Heady words, and I snapped at the bait, intrigued by the raving reviews of the readers. (Be careful not to read all of them, as one gives away the entire ending in one sentence).

I was not disappointed. I was completely captivated by this story in a way I have never been by any other. The originality, teasing slang and the insight into australian post-world war II was a hearty combination that cadenced into one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.

This book went with me everywhere. I discussed it with many and especially enjoyed lingering over certain sentences ripe with slang. It was probably one of the most delightful aspects of reading this book; the freshness and foreigness to me as an American reading the saucy expressions of Australians. The humor is hilarious, and there was a smile for nearly every page I read and also moments that made your heart melt. At this very moment, there are friends of mine working in medicine (hospital) still trying to figure out what Tim Winton meant by "the smell of nugget in the webbing."

Aside from the hilarity, the novel is about two families that by chance come together to live in the same large home. The Pickles Family inherits a large home from a relative that dies suddenly and unexpectantly. Thanks to this relative (Uncle Joel) and his wise forethought, he bars his brother, Sam from selling the home for 20 years. Joel's motivation is a premeditated attempt to protect the wife and children of Sam and Sam's gambling at the race tracks, not to mention the unfortunate work related amputation of his fingers on one hand that renders him nearly unemployable. Since things are pretty grim anyway (they are living above the bar that Joel owns and "working" off the rent,) Sam's drunken wife Dolly, and his children move on up to Cloudstreet and the mansion in the offering.

Sam, ever so shifty, immediately, and without prior consultation with the rest of his family, rents out one half of the house to the Lamb family. The Lambs are the absolute opposite of the Pickles. Religious, and with their own family sorrows, they pack in and set up a grocery store in their one half of the lower story to make a living.

The Lambs arrive after suffering through the near drowning of their most beloved son, Fish. (note the irony.)
Fish, retarded and prone to sensing spirits in the house and in and of himself becomes essential to the story and the telling. Revolving around this poor boy are the steel strength-heart soft mother, Oriel, and father Lester, a hen-pecked, sweet tempered,entertaining pa. Son "Quick" is the angst-ridden brother who feels responsible for Fish's accident and grows up fighting the evils around him. The other sisters round out this lively family.

Many characters and sub-plots keep this book a page turner that will entertain and move you. I look forward to reading the rest of his novels.

PS : there is a study guide for those that want to enhance the novel. See Amazon.com under author Tim Winton.

Sad . . .
It is sad to see this book is out of print. I still have a hardback copy on my shelf. Since first reading the book -- the first time I read it I had actually checked it out of the library -- I have obtained three copies at my favorite used bookstore, giving away two copies to friends. Maybe it was because Tim Winton was not a household name even among readers or maybe it was because "Cloudstreet" did not appear in Harold Bloom's list of canonical books (and I felt it should have been), but there is no other work of fiction I've felt strong enough about to get three copies to give away two -- that I felt needed to be read and read by as many people as possible. A marvelous allegory, a great work of fantasy with so much of the gritty details of the mundane world you forget how unlikely these two families are that live in the house on Cloudstreet. The Pickles and The Lambs, the two sides of a spiritual person. The Lambs: moral, charitable, and hardworking, but without any faith. On the other end, Sam Pickle, a drunkard and gambler, but a man who knows about what it means to live in the shadow of God: that some days you cannot lose, and other days . . . to get out of bed is asking for trouble. And then there is Fish Lamb who half comes back from his watery grave, the other half living in the world of the spirit watching over the people he loves and telling us their story. I cannot say too much . . . this is a book that needs to be read and then it needs to be contemplated with the sense of wonder it evokes.

An absorbing and moving book
This book follows the lives of two Australian families who share a house from the 1940s to the 1960s. Both families are poor, but one believes in "luck" and the other creates their own luck. It's a wonderful, absorbing portrayal of a wide variety of characters, the ups and downs of their lives and the vicissitudes and joys of their crowded lives. The writing was very engaging, although American readers might have some trouble with some of the Australian language.