Eyrie

Tim Winton

Synopsis

Eyrie is Tim Winton's 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.

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.

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.
Evie Wyld, Guardian

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.
Evening Standard

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.
Guardian Australia