That Eye, the Sky

'The best book about a boy I've read since Huckleberry Finn.' Sydney Morning Herald Ort knows the sky is watching. He knows what it means to watch; he spends long hours listening at doors and peering through cracks. Things are terribly wrong. His father is withering away, his sister is consumed by hatred, his grandmother is all inside herself, and his mother, a flower-child of the 1960s, is brave but helpless. Then a strange man appears at their door. That Eye, the Sky is a luminous novel about a boy's vision of the world beyond, about finding a way through cataclysm. Everything begins at the moment the ute driven by Ort Flack's father ploughs into a roadside tree, throwing the whole world out of kilter. 'A wrenching story that proves that love like Ort's can prevail against hell itself.' Publishers Weekly 'The use of natural imagery – of moon and cloud, sky and water and dying trees – to suggest Ort's experience of the ineffable is as graceful as a poet's.' Washington Post 'The great strength of the novel is in the way the grotesque contrasts and parallels in human life are spread out, examined and accepted … Winton has skilfully combined love and devotion with harsh realities.' Elizabeth Jolley, Los Angeles Times