A book for the beach: The Turning by Tim Winton

Stories of the ordinary struggles of Western Australians encompass violence and abuse but also rise to flights of sheer beauty

I found Tim Winton's book, The Turning, in a small hotel in Italy and it became my siesta-time reading for the next few days. Its 17 short chapters interweave the lives of some of the inhabitants of a small coastal fishing town in Western Australia.

It is not always a comforting book to read but the opening chapter dropped me straight back into my teenage son's surfing world. The language of this first story is vivid surfing vernacular, which Winton knows well, since he grew up with it, and I did wonder how the first owner of this book (clearly bought in an Italian bookshop) would have coped with it if they had never heard it before. The narrator and his mate, Biggie, are in that post school-leaving limbo, itching to get on with life but uncertain of what they want. They work a "crappy Saturday job" at the local meat works where they pack bloody meat into boxes for "cray bait", and they are saving up for a V8 Sandman with a "filthy great mattress in the back": a legendary "chick-magnet".

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