The Pickles family inherits, but cannot afford to keep, Cloudstreet, a rambling, ramshackled house-so they take in the Lambs as their boarders. After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. With sensitivity and vision, novelist Tim Winton creates an Australian classic that takes the listener into the world of two wholly believable working-class families in post-WWII Perth. Winton shows himself a worthy successor to his countryman Martin Boyd, who portrayed the Anglo-Australian society of previous generations. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Wintons sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday. Featuring lyrical passages and rapid-fire, minimally punctuated dialogue, this satiric, affectionate family saga is tragic and hilarious-and often both at once. 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.

The dilemma is resolved with the sudden arrival of the rigid, God-fearing Lamb family, whom the rather libertine Pickles take in as boarders. Fortunately, the family inherits a rambling old house-the Cloudstreet of the title-in which they can live, although they still lack cash. Sam Pickles earns a modest living mining guano for nitrate until he loses his hand in an accident. ``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. ``Luck don't change, love,'' observes Sam Pickles to his daughter Rose.

Cloudstreet by tim winton