Recommendations
Books Like Cloudstreet
Two families, one big Perth house, twenty years of ordinary life
If Cloudstreet moved you — the Lambs and the Pickles, the river, Fish's strange consciousness, the sense of working-class Australian life rendered with complete literary seriousness — these eight novels share its attention to family, its Western Australian setting, or its portrait of postwar lives shaped by forces the characters can barely name.
- 1Buy
Dirt Music
by Tim Winton
Georgie Jutland and Lu Fox in the pearling town of White Point — Winton's novel written a decade after Cloudstreet; the most direct companion in its setting (coastal Western Australia), its prose intensity, and its portrait of people living under the weight of what has happened to them; shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the obvious next Winton read after Cloudstreet
- 2Buy
Breath
by Tim Winton
Pikelet and Loonie learning to surf massive waves on the Western Australian coast — Winton's most concentrated and compressed novel; shares Cloudstreet's attention to male friendship, risk, and the relationship between physical experience and spiritual meaning; shorter and more accessible than Cloudstreet and the best starting point for readers new to Winton
- 3Buy
True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey
Ned Kelly narrating his own life in letters to the daughter he will never know — Carey's Booker Prize winner is the Eastern-Australian counterpart to Cloudstreet's Western-Australian portrait: both novels are about Australian working-class life with literary ambition proportionate to their subjects, both use prose of extraordinary energy, and both insist that Australian lives are as worthy of serious literary attention as English or American ones
- 4Buy
Oscar and Lucinda
by Peter Carey
A gambling English clergyman and an Australian heiress in 1860s colonial Australia — Carey's first Booker Prize winner shares Cloudstreet's sense of Australia as a place where extraordinary things happen to ordinary people, its delight in the English language pushed to its limits, and its willingness to use a plot of almost absurd extravagance to explore the deepest questions about faith and identity
- 5Buy
Carpentaria
by Alexis Wright
Normal Phantom and the Waanyi people of the Gulf of Carpentaria — Wright's Miles Franklin Award-winning novel is the Aboriginal-Australian companion to Cloudstreet's settler-Australian one: the same commitment to Australian working-class and community life, the same extraordinary prose, and the same conviction that Australian experience is as rich and complex as any in the world; where Cloudstreet is set in Perth, Carpentaria is set in the far north
- 6Buy
The Slap
by Christos Tsiolkas
Eight perspectives on a backyard barbecue where a man slaps another person's child — Tsiolkas's Miles Franklin Award-winning novel shares Cloudstreet's portrait of Australian suburban and family life, its ensemble cast, and its interest in the social codes and tensions that ordinary Australian life contains; where Cloudstreet is warmly lyrical, Tsiolkas is deliberately provocative, but both novels take Australian ordinary life with complete seriousness
- 7Buy
Pugilism
by Tim Winton
Short stories set in Western Australia — Winton's collection is the most direct companion to the short-form prose that informed Cloudstreet; for readers who want more Winton's specific attention to working-class Western Australian life without committing to another long novel
- 8Buy
The Riders
by Tim Winton
Fred Scully waiting at an Irish farmhouse for a wife who arrives alone — Winton's Booker-shortlisted novel is the European complement to Cloudstreet's Australian one: the same sense of a man waiting for a life that does not arrive in the expected form, the same intensity of feeling, but transposed to Ireland and Greece; recommended for readers who want to follow Scully as far as the West Australian landscape allows
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