The pair aren’t exactly kindred spirits, but there’s a bond between them - mainly in the form of “deep diving and breath-holding against the clock”. The only time he is ever sure of himself is when he is swimming in the local river or surfing in the ocean.īut when he meets “Loonie”, the town’s wild child, everything changes. Bruce Pike, or “pikelet”, is an outsider - his parents are English immigrants - who has no friends and lacks confidence. I read Breath over the course of a few cold winter days and found myself mesmerised by the gentle, occasionally heart-breaking, story that unfolds, of a boy growing up on the Western Australian coast in the 1970s. But he does it so delicately you’re not even aware that it’s happening - a bit like breathing itself - until you put the book down and mull things over. In Breath, his eighth novel, he focuses on the concept of breath - and breathing - so that it infuses almost every page.

You’ve got to hand it to Tim Winton for being able to pick a theme and really work it. This book confirms his standing alongside Ian McEwan and Philip Roth as one of the major chroniclers of the human condition, a writer of novels that are at the same time simple and profound, relentlessly gripping and deeply moving.Fiction – paperback Picador 247 pages 2009. With Breath, Tim Winton's writing has attained a new level of mastery. Half a lifetime later, Pike can't free himself from where the ride took him. In the endless search for the biggest wave, the biggest high, some riders don't make it. But the sea can teach the hard way, and so could Sando. He taught them about surfing, and about life. Gradually Loonie and Pike got to know this loner, Sando, who took them under his wing, showing them secret beaches and ever-bigger waves. He turned up alone, when the swell was highest, and left the rest of them for dead. They couldn't help it: they were terrified they were addicted.Īmong the local surfers, one guy stood out. When Loonie and Pike started to surf, they cycled from Angelus to the beach with their Styrofoam boards, buffeted by the wind and, when they finally get to the sea, the waves. He still lives with the legacy of his own adolescence. He doesn't know the boy, but he knows the story.

Pike's partner wonders why the boy killed himself. Breath opens with Bruce Pike, now a paramedic, arriving too late to save a teenage boy's life.

Breath by tim winton