Rating: 
Summary: Love as Obsession, Love as Salvation
Review: Tim Winton's novel "The Riders", a Booker Prize nominee, is a story about love. About different kinds of love, to be precise.Jennifer, a shadow figure, a mysterious woman with excellent legs and distorted self-esteem, abandons her unhomely but affectionate husband Scully and seven-year old daughter Billie. The novel is a story of father-and-daughter travel across Europe in search of their lost wife and mother. Scully's love to his runaway wife becomes an obsession, a kind of madness that is ready to crash and mutilate everything and everyone, including himself and his dear daughter. It increases with his inquiries at the places which he thought to be niches of mutual love and tenderness but turned out to be hideouts of disenchantment and infidelity. Scully couldn't overtake the eluding apparition of former passion but he could be rescued by other love that was always near, love of his daughter. 'Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clear water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That's what she (i.e., Billie) believed. That's how it was.' This is not the difference between sexual and asexual love that makes sense but the difference between love as obsession and love as salvation. And it was necessary for Scully to walk a long and winding road of personal painful experience to reach the simple truth.
Rating: 
Summary: I never recommend a book I can't put down.
Review: Winton's, The Riders, is a modern gothic mystery that keeps the reader engaged throughout the book. All kinds of readers will love this book. Tim Winton is a quiet genius. Look for his other works.
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