From the Booker shortlisted author of Dirt Music and Cloudstreet, Eyrie is a heart-stoppingly moving novel for our times.
Tim Winton has published twenty-five books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.
Often extremely funny . . . Some readers will be surprised that a
novel from the twice-Booker-shortlisted author takes place around a
tower block, so successfully has he made himself the poet laureate
of the wide sky, the red dirt, the salt and thick estuarine mud of
Western Australia in his previous work. But it is in many ways the
logical end point of tensions between the natural world and human
exploitation of it that have been present in his work from the
beginning . . . Winton is in absolute command of his story. The
pace and tension is unremitting, the language unfussy while
retaining Winton's trademark lyricism . . . After reading this
novel, I had a feeling of bruised revelation.
*Guardian*
Winton has always been good on estrangement and never more so than
here . . . [he] is also terrific on physical sensation. Here, as a
befuddled Keely tries to negotiate the baking-hot streets assailed
by impressions on all sides, it's almost as if he's surfing on dry
land . . . Time and again I found myself panting admiringly at
Winton's imagery . . . one hell of a ride.
*Evening Standard*
In Tom Keely, Winton has created a narrator whose misfortune and
fury is matched by a merciless and mordant wit, and Winton has
rarely been funnier . . . Eyrie is a superb novel: a novel of
disillusionment and redemption, loss and beauty, the taking of
responsibility and the overcoming of disappointment.
*Guardian Australia*
A heartfelt story of disillusionment and salvation . . . Winton has
a raptor's eye for telling images and tender acts . . . The
rhythmic, highly wrought prose [is] undercut by bathos and mordant
wit.
*Telegraph*
Eyrie is a work of toughened wisdom. Many of the sentences in it
are like bits of broken glass. They are so sharp you could cut
yourself on them . . . It is rich in compassion and affectionate
towards the unlovely . . . a novel for which our culture has been
in urgent need
*Age*
Eyrie has the fast pace of a thriller and the beauty of a poem. You
cannot help rooting for its cast of bruised characters.
*Sunday Express*
As a funny, compassionate and gripping study of family difference
and solidarity, Eyrie resembles Tim Winton's most famous novel,
Cloudstreet. Ultimately, though, it is about a man's quest for
redemption, and as he goes about his task Winton ensures that we
root for Keely every step of the way.
*Literary Review*
Winton comes vividly and vigorously into his own in his novel's
blazingly immediate portrayal of Fremantle and Perth . . . [Eyrie]
consolidates his status as a matchlessly exhilirating and
excoriating fictional chronicler of Western Australia
*Sunday Times*
Winton describes Keely's world in virtuosic prose and salty
dialogue that rings true. But this is not just a serious and deeply
humane portrait of people buffeted by life - it is also a
fascinating and insightful portrait of Fremantle ('Old Freo') and
Perth, gateways to Western Australia's vast ore riches. Winton is
at his best describing those cities' yawning disparities of wealth
- and the associated environmental cost
*Metro*
By turns bleak and uplifting, but always compassionate and funny,
this is an enthralling novel about renewal and the sheer mess of
being human. Winton is always well worth reading. Here he is on top
form
*Mail on Sunday*
Fans of Mr Winton will expect lucid characterisation and
atmospheric prose; the author finds poetry in the grimmest scenes.
Eyrie has all this plus a page-turning narrative that tumbles
inexorably towards its ending. This is Tim Winton on searingly good
form
*The Economist*
It is always a cause for a celebration when the great Australian
writer Tim Winton has a new book out...This is a tough and urban
Winton, replete with thugs and drug dealers and prison visits, but
still with glimpses of something more pastoral and serene. It's
also often very funny
*Transmitter*
This is one of Tim Winton's most eloquent novels . . . Winton's
knack of finding tenderness in desperate lives is hugely
impressive
*Irish Mail on Sunday*
Winton writes with all five senses
*Intelligent Life*
Tim Winton is one of the world's leading novelists...Written in
Australian English and liberally studded with words and phrases
that make Standard English feel limp and drab, it crackles with
caustic energy
*Glasgow Herald*
Winton's style is lush, literary and viciously comic
*Tablet*
Where Winton comes vividly and vigorously into his own is in his
novel's blazingly immediate portrayal of Fremantle and Perth,
sizzling, during a scorching February, between the flaring light of
the Indian Ocean and roasting wings from the red plains of the
Australian interior
*Sunday Times Ireland*
Eyrie is a dark but dazzling study of people and places on the edge
. . . in [Winton's] hands, with his distinctive Australian voice
and vernacular, this disquieting story also has the power to
surprise and delight-perhaps even to inspire
*New York Times Book Review*
Of the many achievements of this extraordinary novel, one of the
most remarkable is the way the past gradually spills into the
present . . . In a book full of terrific characters and sharply
drawn relationships, the most memorable is the bond between Keely
and the seemingly doomed Kai. It's heartbreaking
*Washington Post*
A brilliant tour-de-force
*Seattle Times*
[A] beautifully written powerful ninth novel . . . [Winton's] an
absurdly good writer, with not only the proverbial eye for detail
but also a facility for rendering each detail in an original way.
Winton is ambitious; this is a state-of-the-nation novel about a
world run amok . . . this is a fascinating, thought-provoking
book
*Publishers Weekly*
[Eyrie] bears witness to how the sprawling suburban world of this
older generation, so often perched on the edge of wilder natural
landscapes, has been tidied up, boxed in, the ecology of childhood
imagination narrowed to PlayStation and satellite dish. Mostly
though, it is a clear-eyed yet compassionate depiction of the
underclass that lives off the crumbs of the resource boom . . .
However elaborate your analysis of Eyrie, the novel stands, like
all of the author's work, on its ability to marry sophistication
and simplicity. Page by page it is an engrossing novel; the reader
is moved and enraged in equal measure by the plain human story of
Keely and his beautiful, battered adoptive family. You long for the
good guy to win. You pray and ache for a fresh start for them all.
And, as ever, it is couched in the prose of a writer on whom
nothing is lost, for whom the tiniest local detail bears an
epiphanic charge . . . 'Bravo,' thinks Keely, 'f . . king brava.'
On finishing Eyrie, I felt much the same
*Australian*
Winton's finest novel to date
*Irish Times*
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