Dirt Music: A Novel - Hardcover

Winton, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743228022 ISBN 13: 9780743228022

Publisher: Scribner, 2002

Synopsis

Despite her marriage to the widowed Jim Buckridge, Georgie Jutland has never really settled into his opulent home or become a part of his inbred fishing community, and her tentative link to conventional life is further jeopardized when she becomes embroiled in a love affair with Luther Fox, the local poacher and outcast. By the author of The Riders. 75,000 first printing.

About this title

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 grew up on the coast of Western Australia, where he continues to live. His novel The Riders was nominated for the Booker Prize, and he has won numerous awards for his thirteen previous books. Many of them have been adapted for the stage and screen, including That Eye, the Sky and Cloudstreet, which appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a world tour, in October 2001.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743228022
• ISBN 13: 9780743228022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416