Dirt Music

'Wonderfully alive, inventive and assured.' The Age

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognises herself.

One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from the computer screen to see a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox, the local poacher. Jinx. Outcast…

In prose as haunting and beautiful as its western setting, Dirt Music confirms Tim Winton's status as one of the finest novelists of his generation.

'… an immense work, and its dominant inspiration is a passion for the natural world that makes Winton not just a writer … but a poet-prophet in the Romantic sense, and one of Australia's most precious cultural assets.' Weekend Australian

'Awe-inspiring … Sentence by sentence there are few finer stylists writing in English today.' Chicago Tribune