Dirt Music - Softcover

Winton, Tim

3.87

14,219 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330490265 ISBN 13: 9780330490269

Publisher: Macmillan Pub Ltd, 2008

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Georgie Jutland has lost her way. Living with a fisherman she doesn`t love, feeling alienated from her neighbours, she spends her nights in a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Until one morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from her computer screen to see a shadow on the beach below her. 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 journey across landscapes within and without, and a love story about people stifled by grief, regret and lost dreams.

`Winton keeps writing fiction that makes the novel feel alive to a continent of possibilities` Evening Standard

`Winton is not a great Australian novelist; he is a great novelist, full stop` The Times

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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. His work includes novels, collections of stories, non-fiction and books for children. He has won the miles Franklin Award three times, and been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for The Riders (1995) and Dirt Music (2002).

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