Georgie Jutland is a mess. At fort, with her career in ruins, she finds stranded 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 blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace.

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.

So begins an unlikely alliance. Set in the wild landscape of Western Australia , this is a novel about the odds of breaking with the past, a love story about people stifled by grief or regret, whose dreams are lost, whose hopes have dried up. It's a journey across landscapes within and without, about the music that sometimes arises from the dust.

 

TIM WINTON was born in Perth in 1960. He is the author of fifteen books, including novels, a collection of short stories, non-fiction and books for children. His first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian / Vogel Award. Cloudstreet won the Banjo and the Miles Franklin awards in Australia , as well as the Deo Gloria Prize in England , and has been successfully adapted for the theatre. Dirt Music was shortlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize, and his previous novel, The Riders, was shortlisted in 1995.