Tim Winton's characters are people we're familiar with - their struggles and small triumphs are our own. Here they change in ways that are sometimes vast, sometimes indistinct, but every story illuminates things we take for granted. Even as some of these lives turn from expansive hope to defeated middle-age, there's a sense of greater possibility, fuelled by the great turning of time itself.

Now a major film starring Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving and Rose Byrne.

'The writing is frankly brilliant . . . Winton shows us how startling ordinary life is. And he does it in a way that's more amazing than if he had shown a ghost shimmering on the page.' Boston Globe

'Each of these seventeen stories is a self-contained whole . . . yet the sequence reveals striking connections among seemingly disparate lives and experiences. The result is at times mysterious, moving and occasionally deeply unsettling.' Sydney Morning Herald

'Winton is a poet of baffled souls . . . To read him is to be reminded not just of the possibilities of fiction but of the human heart.' The Times