The Turning

Use these links to supplement and complement students’ reading of the work and to increase their overall enjoyment of literature. Challenge them to discern parallel themes, engage through visual and aural stimuli, and delve deeper into the thematic possibilities presented by the title.

Recommended Texts for Pairing

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

• Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in stories contains similar structural elements, as characters move in and out of each other’s lives in a small town.
• offers up an inversion of The Sins of the Father theme, as the title character is a complicated mother figure for her own children and the children of the small town she lives in
• Olive Kitteridge on SuperSummary

Corpus Christi by Bret Anthony Johnston

• Johnston’s collection populates a beach community with tragic figures, tracing the way community, family, and trauma are interwoven in ways that are similar to Winton’s work.
• contains similar themes of The Sins of the Father and Adolescent Obsession

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

• Alexis Wright’s story of Aboriginal people serves as an important counterpoint to Winton’s book, presenting a side of Australian culture that is often invisible or underrepresented in its literary canon.
• Similar to Winton’s book, it addresses The Influence of Class and Race on the characters’ lives.

Other Student Resources

Royal Commission Into Whether There Has Been Corrupt or Criminal Conduct By Any Western Australian Police Officer

• The background action of The Turning is based on the events that were investigated in what is known as the Kennedy Royal Commission, and the findings outlined in this government document detail the pervasive, unrepentant corruption of Western Australia’s police force at the time.
• The executive summary at the beginning of this document will provide a broad overview of the problem and lack of action on the part of the police.

Waiting for the new wave: an interview with Tim Winton

• This Guardian interview provides context on Winton’s childhood growing up in Perth and his desire to create an Australian regionalism in the vein of American authors like Faulkner.

Teacher Resources

Sequences, Anti-Sequences, Cycles, and Composite Novels: The Short Story in Genre Criticism

• This essay by Suzanne Ferguson in the Journal of the Short Story in English provides a broad overview of linked short story collections, their historical precedents in the canon, and thoughts on the state of the genre concurrent with the release of The Turning.
• will be useful to teachers looking for a way to prime students for structural and thematic concepts that recur throughout the subgenre

Trauma of Australia’s Indigenous ‘Stolen Generations’ is still affecting children today

• This Nature article provides an overview of the 20th-century practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families in order to force assimilation.
• This is just one example of the inhumane treatment of Aboriginal people, and serves as important context for the anxiety that Aboriginal characters express in Winton’s stories.