Eyrie

Tim Winton's heart-stopping, exhilarating Eyrie asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing. "Eyrie is breathtaking, honest, provocative... From the opening pages, you know you are in the hands of a master" (Weekend Australian)."A superb tale of disillusionment and redemption, loss and beauty, this is Winton in top form... He has rarely been funnier." - Michael Williams, The GuardianIn Eyrie, Tim Winton crafts the story of Tom Keely, a man struggling to accomplish good in an utterly fallen world. Once an ambitious, altruistic environmentalist, Keely now finds himself broke, embroiled in scandal, and struggling to piece together some semblance of a life. From the heights of his urban high-rise apartment, he surveys the wreckage of his life and the world he's tumbled out of love with. Just before he descends completely into pills and sorrow, a woman from his past and her preternatural child appear, perched on the edge of disaster, desperate for help. When you're fighting to keep your head above water, how can you save someone else from drowning? As Keely slips into a nightmarish world of con artists, drug dealers, petty violence, and extortion, Winton confronts the cost of benevolence and creates a landscape of uncertainty. "Sometimes brooding, always superbly well-written, Winton’s story studies family... both as anchor to keep the ship from drifting away and anchor to keep whomever it’s tied to submerged... Another exquisite portrait of troubled modern life from Winton, who solidifies his reputation as one of the best writers at work in Australia [today]." - Kirkus ReviewsEyrie is a thrilling and vertigo-inducing morality tale, at once brutal and lyrical, from one of our finest storytellers whose work is both tough and tender, primordial and new - always revealing the raw, instinctual drives that lure us together and rend us apart. Tom Keely has lost his way, and now, middle-aged and jobless 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 is determined to cut himself off, until one day he runs into some neighbours: a woman he used to know when they were kids, and her introverted young boy, Kai. The encounter shakes him up in a way he doesn't understand and, despite himself, Keely lets them in. As Keely's fascination and love for Kai develops he is drawn deeper into their world, and into their troubled and dangerous past. What follows is a heart-stopping, ground-breaking novel for our times -- funny, confronting, exhilarating and haunting -- populated by unforgettable characters. Eyrie asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing.