Dirt Music

‘Generous, earthy and raw . . . Mysteries don’t come more heartfelt than this’ Independent

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself 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 a 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.

‘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