Short Story Collections

Thirteen stories show people struggling with change, disintegration, love, losses, and the problems of living in the modern world

'These stories are a wonderful introduction to his quirky fictional world gutsy, funny, lyrical but unpretentious Independent Tim Winton's second short-story collection explores the complexity of human relationships through the themes of futility and hope, revenge and redemption, birth and death that twist through each tale in turn, emerging, re-emerging, competing, conflicting. As characters, too, surface and reappear, their lives are slowly, painstakingly revealed. Through frozen moments and stolen glances, their stories and histories are told, their emotions exposed, their souls stripped bare. Threaded together by Tim Winton's haunting prose, the tales in Minimum of Two ultimately offer an optimistic view of the world in which we live. 'Winton ...writes with a muscular looseness which is suited perfectly to the people and places he is describing' The Times 'Tim Winton has cracked something essential about modern Australia: how to find meaning in the intimate and terrible parts of contemporary family life, set against a landscape which is inhumanly vast' Evening Standard 'The vividness and clarity that Mr Winton responds to in nature are also beautifully embodied in his own writing' The Economist

The author of Dirt Music and The Riders captures the urgency of memory and the way an entire life can be shaped by one event from the past in this capsule of connected stories set on the coast of Western Australia. Tim Winton's stunning collection of connected stories is about turnings of all kinds—changes of heart, slow awakenings, nasty surprises and accidents, sudden detours, resolves made or broken. Brothers cease speaking to each other, husbands abandon wives and children, grown men are haunted by childhood fears. People struggle against the weight of their own history and try to reconcile themselves to their place in the world. With extraordinary insight and tenderness, Winton explores the demons and frailties of ordinary people whose lives are not what they had hoped.