Gifted to me by a friend – not my usual SciFi/Fantasy/Speculative Fiction. But I trust my friends taste and dove into the book with no idea what it was about.
It’s Australian and written in “Australian” which takes a bit of adjusting to – a bit like listening to someone speaking Cockney; at first you have no idea what they are saying or even what they are talking about, but after a while…you start to get the lingo, the colloquialisms and you get into it. Carn! Chooks! Fair Dinkum! Written in a style where there is dialogue but no quotation marks. Not sure what that is called, but it’s interesting. Kind of like it’s being written from a “gods eye view” perspective but a bit different.
Ok, so the plot is this; two very different working class families in post war Oz, specifically Western Oz, specifically the city of Perth, end up sharing a very large old rambling house on “Cloud Street”. This is the tale of the 20 years (1944-1964) that the Pickles and the Lambs co-inhabit the place. Both families have had hard times and a variety of bad luck; the Pickles are gamblers and boozers, the Lambs are industrious and united. That would be an uninteresting premise to me (seriously, no aliens? no alternate universe? no supernatural aspect?), but what made this book worth reading is the way the story is told, the writing style, the colloquial Oz dialect, the quirks of the characters and the desire to find out what happens to these people.
Apparently this is a hugely popular book in Oz – they made a movie and everything. I can see why. Enjoyable read. Couldn’t put it down.