Scanning the far horizon

Following his previous three novels — the work upon which much of Winton’s international acclaim rests — the 17 interconnected stories of The Turning come as something of a revelation. Those previous works, to this reviewer’s mind, have tended towards being overwritten and over-embellished (give-away epithets such as ‘lyrical’, ‘exuberant’, ‘inventive’ and ‘gutsy’ commonly recur).

In The Turning, however, Winton has spectacularly reinvented himself and reined in his writing to create a world of pared-down, stunning and entirely believable completeness and complexity; a world at once exotically alien and instantly knowable. There is a precision here, and an openness, a honed inventiveness in which the telling detail and prescient moment count for considerably more than the endless detail and infilling of some of his previous work.

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Tom Bower

The truth about Mohamed Al-Fayed

The failing Australian seaside town of Angelus is the focus for these tales. There are men and women (and Winton is impressively confident and adept at using female narrators) fighting against their pasts and their futures, and bridging the abyss of the present on their journeys to yearned-for better lives: women clinging to violent men because men elsewhere are not what they know; school-leavers imagining worlds in which to improbably reinvent themselves; fishermen adrift and then stranded in the wrack of a world in which their livelihoods are destroyed on a distant whim; schoolgirls dreaming of the women they will become and of the power they might possess once their desperate need to be loved, or at least noticed, is fulfilled; old surfers sitting on grey beaches on windless days watching calm seas and wondering about how swiftly their youthful ambitions and aspirations have been squandered; children severing family ties in painful and terrible ways only to discover themselves bound twice as securely to...