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  • Published: 2 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9780143568797
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $22.99

Dirt Music




Full of unforgettable characters, Dirt Music is Tim Winton's classic love song to land and place.

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. Leached of all confidence, she spends her days in isolated tedium and her nights in a blur of vodka self-recrimination. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she sees, a shadow drifting up the beach below - a loner called Luther Fox, with danger in his wake.

  • Published: 2 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9780143568797
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Tim Winton

Tim Winton is the author of 30 books. His work has been widely translated and adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He lives in Western Australia.

Also by Tim Winton

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Praise for Dirt Music

An immense work.

Weekend Australian

Awe-inspiring . . . There are few finer stylists writing in English today.

Chicago Tribune

Wonderfully alive, inventive and assured.

The Age

Vividly written in a seemingly effortless prose that never puts a foot wrong.

Sunday Times

His prose retains the power both to shock and to fill us with wonder.

The Bulletin

A compelling novel.

Times Literary Supplement

Beautiful, aching . . . compelling.

Washington Post

A cracking read, full of big scenery, lust, action, a Hollywood ending and the poetry of the landscape, which Winton brings to life with such mastery. A compelling novel.

HQ

With masterly economy and control, Winton unfurls a story of secrets, regrets and new beginnings. His prose, sprinkled with regional vernacular, combines cool dispassion and lyric concision.

Publishers Weekly

A sort of sexual shimmering pervades the atmosphere. Perhaps Winton’s most considerable achievement is his description of this fishing community, with its violence, its resentment of urban big shots . . . and its love of 'dirt music', an Australian composite of everything that was ever moaned along to a guitar in the United States.

The Guardian

This fine, haunting story stays with you long after you’ve put it down.

Irish Times

Muscular yet lyrical prose . . . the novel leaves echoes in your mind long after you have shut the book.

New Statesman

A cracking page-turner . . . Few living novelists write better about the sea . . . The vividness and clarity that Mr Winton responds to in nature are also beautifully embodied in his own writing.

The Economist

A gripping tale with a confident grasp of human nature and a wonderful feel for the physical world.

The Herald (Glasgow)

Winton has written an intense read, raw and beautiful, studded with shards of rage.

Entertainment Weekly

It is a wildly personal story, but it also seems like a drama that needs to be played out against and over a terrain as rigorous and baleful as Winton’s West,

Australian Book Review

An extraordinary depiction of a man coming to terms with his soul in the tropical wilderness of northern Australia . . . Gripping . . . Winton’s writing is a heady blend of muscular description, deep sentiment and metaphysics . . . Dirt Music is a beautiful celebration of his country.

Sunday Telegraph

A very Australian story – beautifully so.

Time Out

Stunningly written . . . It’s a revelation of a book . . . In Winton’s skilled hands, the vast landscape of Australia, conjured with lyrical intensity, becomes a fittingly huge backdrop to events whose enormity is born out of desperation . . . All in all, it’s a magnificent book with themes as enormous as its landscape.

The Big Issue (UK)

Winton has cracked something essential about modern Australia: how to find meaning in the intimate and terrible parts of contemporary family life, against a landscape which is inhumanly vast . . . Winton keeps writing fiction that makes the novel feel alive to a continent of possibilities.

Evening Standard

The thick, briny scent of Western Australia wafts through Tim Winton’s latest novel, Dirt Music. It is a book of such lyrical prose that you can fairly taste the sea on your fingertips with each turn of the page.

Good Reading Magazine

Winton’s book performs the difficult feat of combining poetic lyricism with the blood and guts of life . . . his ability to describe the glorious Aussie seascape is unparalleled.

Marie Claire (UK)

Tim Winton is never more brilliant than on home ground. This is the setting for Dirt Music, a searing psychological thriller that is unputdownable . . . Winton sweeps you right in. Dirt Music makes most other current novels look positively anaemic.

Ham & High

Tim Winton’s seventh novel is, on the surface, a straightforward 'love and flight' story but the haunting prose and subtle intimations of the plot make for far more than the obvious . . . The rhythm of Winton’s writing succeeds in giving Dirt Music an almost hypnotic allure.

Evening Herald (Dublin)

Written in that wonderful, unembellished prose Winton is renowned for, Dirt Music is anchored by the sheer power and mysticism of the Australian landscape and the author’s own desire to allow his characters to keep certain secrets hidden.

Australian Style