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About Scission (Unabridged)

Award-winning author Tim Winton's first collection of short fiction contains spare, jagged stories in which people struggle with change and disintegration. The world Tim Winton paints in Scission is often harsh and disturbing, inhabited by isolated, unforgiving characters. It is a world at once familiar, filled with the trappings of home and family, and yet also strangely twisted – a world where casual brutality and unexpected death are never far from the surface. Evident in a young girl’s violent temper once the eggs she has so jealously guarded finally hatch, or in the careless indifference of the woman stepping over a soldier’s spreadeagled body, Tim Winton’s world is a place where dysfunction and disorder constantly threaten the equilibrium. But there is compassion and beauty there too – whether it’s in the brush of a father’s hand against his young son’s cheek, or the neighbours who wait patiently to celebrate the arrival of a new baby.