Cloudstreet

The Pickles and the Lambs: two ‘true blue’ Aussie families with a fragile but defiant grip on the watery edges of their vast, dusty country. Disaster strikes each – for the Pickles a boating accident that leaves a father ‘minus a working hand’, for the Lambs a drowning from which their son Fish emerges alive but not quite intact. With eight children between them, they find themselves sharing Cloudstreet, a dilapidated house in Perth haunted by its own insidious past that only Fish, the book’s narrator, can fathom. There’s the pragmatic matriarch Oriel Lamb with her steadfast principles and love of the Queen; the ruinous beauty Dolly Pickles, hell-bent on alcohol-fuelled affairs; her bright daughter Rose, who watches Fish sing hello to the wind and falls in love; and Rose’s loyal father Sam with his childlike resilience to perpetual misfortune: ‘Everybody loved a loser, especially a loser of such romantic proportions’. Their intimate story spans 20 years, as they wrestle with addictions, rancour and love, their undulating laughter and despair underpinned by the rhythms of the great, sighing house, and the rivers and estuaries that they cherish and fear. Once thrown together as casualties of luck, they gradually become a single, sprawling family, reluctantly but deeply attached to their ramshackle home.