Tim Winton on BBC World Service World Book Club

I caught this broadcast last night on BBC World Service, and found it endlessly interesting. I've never read "Cloudstreet", but I like anything grounded in specific locales and places. I love Australia and Australian themes in any event, and Tim Winton had a very humorous and self-deprecating manner, and so I'll have to read the book soon.

This month World Book Club is talking to chart-topping Australian writer Tim Winton about his unforgettable novel Cloudstreet.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton's sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday.

Precipitated by separate personal tragedies, two poor families flee their rural homes to share a "great continent of a house", Cloudstreet, in a suburb of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united and religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.

Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try to make the best of their lives.