Breath

Aus­tralian author, Tim Winton’s gift of writ­ing with clar­ity and sim­plic­ity imme­di­ately sweeps his reader into the story.

In Breath, even the brood­ing dark cover of boy in dusk surf aptly dic­tates the dark­ness that seems to per­me­ate through the entire novel.

Nar­rated by ‘Pikelet’ – a young surfer, it tells the story of his some­times tor­tured life – of the peaks and troughs that come with ado­les­cence.  One of his cen­tral char­ac­ters is his adren­a­lin addicted friend,  Loonie who seems hell-bent on self-destruction Along­side them in their jour­ney is Sando, a has-been surfer and muse – an untouch­able hero of the waves in the young boys’ eyes. He phys­i­cally and men­tally chal­lenges them in his pur­suit of the next big wave.

While Winton’s fault­less descrip­tion of the com­pelling nature of surf­ing and the vivid detail of waves evokes such feel­ing one can almost smell the salti­ness of the surf, the story is far more than a surf­ing tale.

It delves into dan­ger­ous human devi­a­tions, of the tor­tur­ous addic­tion of adren­a­lin played out in the relent­less han­ker­ing after the ulti­mate wave. It is also about unful­filled dreams, wrong choices and dis­ap­point­ment. And it is about mak­ing peace with the way life ulti­mately unfolds.

Tim Win­ton