Eyrie - by Tim Winton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award

An exhilarating new book from Australia's most acclaimed writer

Tim Winton is Australia's most decorated and beloved literary novelist. Short-listed twice for the Booker Prize and the winner of a record four Miles Franklin Awards for Best Australian Novel, he has a gift for language virtually unrivaled among English-language novelists. His work is both tough and tender, primordial and new--always revealing the raw, instinctual drives that lure us together and rend us apart.
In Eyrie, Winton crafts the story of Tom Keely, a man struggling to accomplish good in an utterly fallen world. Once an ambitious, altruistic environmentalist, Keely now finds himself broke, embroiled in scandal, and struggling to piece together some semblance of a life. From the heights of his urban high-rise apartment, he surveys the wreckage of his life and the world he's tumbled out of love with. Just before he descends completely into pills and sorrow, a woman from his past and her preternatural child appear, perched on the edge of disaster, desperate for help.
When you're fighting to keep your head above water, how can you save someone else from drowning? As Keely slips into a nightmarish world of con artists, drug dealers, petty violence, and extortion, Winton confronts the cost of benevolence and creates a landscape of uncertainty. Eyrie is a thrilling and vertigo-inducing morality tale, at once brutal and lyrical, from one of our finest storytellers.

Review Quotes

"Eyrie is a dark but dazzling study of people ance palces 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." --Allison McCullough, The New York Times Book Review

"The beginning of the book is fueled . . . by the astonishing, limber prose that has made Winton one of the most celebrated writers in Australia . . . Of the many achievements of this extraordinary novel, one of the most remarkable is the way the the past gradually spills into the present . . . In a book full of teriffic characters and sharply drawn relationships, the most memorable is the bond between Keely and the seemingly doomed Kai. It's heartbreaking." --Porter Shreve, Washington Post

"A brilliant tour-de-force." --Adam Woog, The Seattle Times

"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 in searingly good form." --The Economist

About the Author

The preeminent Australian novelist of his generation, Tim Winton is the author of the bestselling Cloudstreet, The Riders, and Dirt Music, among many other books. He has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, and Breath) and has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.