Dirt Music - Softcover

Tim Winton

3.87

14,219 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1447202864 ISBN 13: 9781447202868

Publisher: Picador Paperbacks, 2012

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Tim Winton is widely acclaimed as one of Australia's greatest novelists. Dirt Music, first published in 2001, was an international bestseller. In 2002 it won the Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Georgie Jutland is a mess. Her days have fallen into social isolation and her nights are a blur of vodka. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she sees a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox: local poacher, outcast. So begins an unlikely alliance. In 2012 Picador celebrated its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe. Discover more at picador.com/40

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Review:

Arguably one of the finest of all Australian novelists, Tim Winton shows that he remains in top form with Dirt Music, a wistful, charged, ardent novel of female loss and amatory redemption. The setting is Winton's favorite: the thorn-bushed, sheep-farmed, sun-punished boondocks of Western Australia. The cast is limited but spirited: the two chief protagonists are Georgie Jutland, a fortysomething adoptive mother with a vodka problem, and Luther Fox, a brooding, feral, bushwhacking poacher.

The plot is something else altogether: an elegantly wearied, cleverly finessed mutual odyssey that opts to follow the sometimes intertwining, sometimes diverging lives of poor Georgie and Luther as they try to deal with the odd alliance they comprise, as well as the complex and fractured lives they want to leave behind. The way Georgie deals with her unwitting inheritance of two dissatisfied adopted kids is particularly touching, poignant, and well written.

Best of all, though, is the prose. Somehow it manages to be simultaneously juicy and dry, like a desert cactus. This is especially true when Winton touches on the scented harshness of the Down Under outback: "the music is jagged and pushy and he for one just doesn't want to bloody hear it, but the outbursts of strings and piano are as austere and unconsoling as the pindan plain out there with its spindly acacia and red soil." This is a wise and accomplished novel. --Sean Thomas, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author:

Tim Winton was born in Perth in 1960. He has written novels, collections of stories, non-fiction and books for children. He has won Australia's Miles Franklin Award four times, and has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for The Riders (1995) and Dirt Music (2002).

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