Breath by tim winton6/7/2023 ![]() They, for their part, don't entirely approve of his friendship with Loonie but they respond to the vulnerability beneath the boy's swagger and roughness. Their son, "a lone child and solitary by nature", is mildly embarrassed by them. Neither is able to swim, both are afraid of the sea. Pikelet's parents are English migrants, gently out of place with their brogues and fussy ways. Loonie's father, a coarse man with a hint of the Balkans in his voice, runs the local pub. Two teenage boys, Pikelet, the narrator, and Loonie - they have real names too, of course - are growing up in Sawyer, a milling township on a river 50 kilometres from the ocean. On the surface, Breath seems no more than an affectingly nostalgic rites-of-passage tale set three or four decades ago in Winton's mythic landscape, the countryside around Angelus, a maritime town in the south of Western Australia. There, as in this marvellously atmospheric work, Winton's particular gifts come into their own. Nevertheless, his finest accomplishments seem to me to reside in more compressed structures: his earlier novels and the loosely linked stories in The Turning. ![]() He made a name for himself with three generously paced and intricate novels: Cloudstreet, The Riders and Dirt Music. ![]() This short novel may prove to be the best thing Tim Winton has done. ![]()
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