Eyrie

Tom Keely has lost his bearings. His reputation in ruins, he finds himself holed up in a flat at the top of a grim high-rise, looking down on the world he's fallen out of love with. He has cut himself off, and intends to keep it that way, until one day he runs into some neighbours: a woman from his past and her introverted young boy. The encounter shakes him up in a way he doesn't understand and, despite himself, Keely lets them in. But the pair come trailing a dangerous past of their own, and Keely is soon immersed in a world that threatens to destroy everything he has learnt to love. Eyrie is a heart-stopping novel written with breath-taking tenderness. Funny, confronting, exhilarating and haunting, it asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing.

About the Author :
Tim Winton is widely considered one of the greatest living Australian writers. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). In 2023 he was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia for "distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, to conservation, and to environmental advocacy. He lives in Western Australia.

Review :
Often extremely funny . . . Some readers will be surprised that a novel from the twice-Booker-shortlisted author takes place around a tower block, so successfully has he made himself the poet laureate of the wide sky, the red dirt, the salt and thick estuarine mud of Western Australia in his previous work. But it is in many ways the logical end point of tensions between the natural world and human exploitation of it that have been present in his work from the beginning . . . Winton is in absolute command of his story. The pace and tension is unremitting, the language unfussy while retaining Winton's trademark lyricism . . . After reading this novel, I had a feeling of bruised revelation. Winton has always been good on estrangement and never more so than here . . . [he] is also terrific on physical sensation. Here, as a befuddled Keely tries to negotiate the baking-hot streets assailed by impressions on all sides, it's almost as if he's surfing on dry land . . . Time and again I found myself panting admiringly at Winton's imagery . . . one hell of a ride. In Tom Keely, Winton has created a narrator whose misfortune and fury is matched by a merciless and mordant wit, and Winton has rarely been funnier . . . Eyrie is a superb novel: a novel of disillusionment and redemption, loss and beauty, the taking of responsibility and the overcoming of disappointment. A heartfelt story of disillusionment and salvation . . . Winton has a raptor's eye for telling images and tender acts . . . The rhythmic, highly wrought prose [is] undercut by bathos and mordant wit. Eyrie is a work of toughened wisdom. Many of the sentences in it are like bits of broken glass. They are so sharp you could cut yourself on them . . . It is rich in compassion and affectionate towards the unlovely . . . a novel for which our culture has been in urgent need Eyrie has the fast pace of a thriller and the beauty of a poem. You cannot help rooting for its cast of bruised characters. As a funny, compassionate and gripping study of family difference and solidarity, Eyrie resembles Tim Winton's most famous novel, Cloudstreet. Ultimately, though, it is about a man's quest for redemption, and as he goes about his task Winton ensures that we root for Keely every step of the way. Winton comes vividly and vigorously into his own in his novel's blazingly immediate portrayal of Fremantle and Perth . . . [Eyrie] consolidates his status as a matchlessly exhilirating and excoriating fictional chronicler of Western Australia Winton describes Keely's world in virtuosic prose and salty dialogue that rings true. But this is not just a serious and deeply humane portrait of people buffeted by life - it is also a fascinating and insightful portrait of Fremantle ('Old Freo') and Perth, gateways to Western Australia's vast ore riches. Winton is at his best describing those cities' yawning disparities of wealth - and the associated environmental cost By turns bleak and uplifting, but always compassionate and funny, this is an enthralling novel about renewal and the sheer mess of being human. Winton is always well worth reading. Here he is on top form 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 on searingly good form It is always a cause for a celebration when the great Australian writer Tim Winton has a new book out...This is a tough and urban Winton, replete with thugs and drug dealers and prison visits, but still with glimpses of something more pastoral and serene. It's also often very funny This is one of Tim Winton's most eloquent novels . . . Winton's knack of finding tenderness in desperate lives is hugely impressive Winton writes with all five senses Tim Winton is one of the world's leading novelists...Written in Australian English and liberally studded with words and phrases that make Standard English feel limp and drab, it crackles with caustic energy Winton's style is lush, literary and viciously comic Where Winton comes vividly and vigorously into his own is in his novel's blazingly immediate portrayal of Fremantle and Perth, sizzling, during a scorching February, between the flaring light of the Indian Ocean and roasting wings from the red plains of the Australian interior Eyrie is a dark but dazzling study of people and places 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 Of the many achievements of this extraordinary novel, one of the most remarkable is the way the past gradually spills into the present . . . In a book full of terrific characters and sharply drawn relationships, the most memorable is the bond between Keely and the seemingly doomed Kai. It's heartbreaking A brilliant tour-de-force [A] beautifully written powerful ninth novel . . . [Winton's] an absurdly good writer, with not only the proverbial eye for detail but also a facility for rendering each detail in an original way. Winton is ambitious; this is a state-of-the-nation novel about a world run amok . . . this is a fascinating, thought-provoking book [Eyrie] bears witness to how the sprawling suburban world of this older generation, so often perched on the edge of wilder natural landscapes, has been tidied up, boxed in, the ecology of childhood imagination narrowed to PlayStation and satellite dish. Mostly though, it is a clear-eyed yet compassionate depiction of the underclass that lives off the crumbs of the resource boom . . . However elaborate your analysis of Eyrie, the novel stands, like all of the author's work, on its ability to marry sophistication and simplicity. Page by page it is an engrossing novel; the reader is moved and enraged in equal measure by the plain human story of Keely and his beautiful, battered adoptive family. You long for the good guy to win. You pray and ache for a fresh start for them all. And, as ever, it is couched in the prose of a writer on whom nothing is lost, for whom the tiniest local detail bears an epiphanic charge . . . 'Bravo,' thinks Keely, 'f . . king brava.' On finishing Eyrie, I felt much the same Winton's finest novel to date