The Turning

Parched, arid and dusty lives, mirrored in the unremittingly harsh landscape of Australia, have become the stock-in-trade of Tim Winton.

His previous book, the novel Dirt Music, explored the growing closeness between two lonely people adrift in the harsh environment of a Western Australian fishing community. Reading it was a bit like staring at the sun: dazzling, beautiful, painful.

In The Turning, a collection of overlapping stories set mainly in one town, Winton again gives us fractured lives, drifting relationships, and several shades of the violence that can erupt from the bitterness of failure.

There are many turnings here - adolescent sexual awakening and rebellion, revenge, death, the return of a past lover - but the overall theme of these stories is the way (so-called) ordinary people struggle daily under the weight of expectation and regret.

If this sounds gloomy (the title story is particularly harrowing in its portrayal of casual and spiteful domestic violence), don't be put off; Winton's spare and emotive writing about the way human beings survive in spite of each other is extraordinary.

Twice nominated for the Booker Prize, Winton somehow writes bigger than his contemporaries, even though his themes of love, loss and the brutality of life are common to them all.

Maybe that's because Australia has a way of dwarving its inhabitants. Or maybe he's just a great writer. Or both.