Dirt Music - by Tim Winton (Paperback)

About the Book

Booker Prize nominee Tim Winton continues to astonish critics and captivate readers with this Australian love story about people stifled by grief and regret; a novel about the odds of breaking with the past.

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Winner of The Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Christina Stead Award, WA Premier's Book of the Year

Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, Dirt Music tells the story of Luther Fox, a broken man who makes his living as an illegal fisherman--a shamateur.

Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, Fox grew melons and counted stars and loved playing his guitar. Now, his life has become a "project of forgetting." Not until he meets Georgie Jutland, the wife of White Point's most prosperous fisherman, does Fox begin to dream again and hear the dirt music--"anything you can play on a verandah or porch," he tells Georgie, "without electricity."

Like the beat of a barren heart, nature is never silent. Ambitious and perfectly calibrated, Dirt Music resonates with suspense, emotion, and timeless truths.

Review Quotes

Adam Woog The Seattle Times Dirt Music is an...astonishing blend of pell-mell sensation: unreasoning love, grief, the need to escape, desire, fulfillment.

Dan Cryer Chicago Tribune [Dirt Music] is awe-inspiring....Tim Winton makes words into sounds into music into art. Against so persuasive a literary seduction, no resistance is possible.

Karen Valby Entertainment Weekly [A]n intense read, raw and beautiful, studded with shards of rage.

Todd Pruzan The Washington Post Beautiful...compelling...Dirt Music's quiet intensity tightens as the story evolves from a domestic drama into an epic quest.

About the Author

Tim Winton grew up and still lives in Western Australia. Considered the pre-eminent Australian author of his generation, Tim is the author of thirty books which have been widely translated and adapted for film, television, stage, opera, and radio. He has won the Miles Franklin, Australia's most prestigious award, four times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for The Riders and Dirt Music. Renowned for his role in the campaign to save Ningaloo Reef in 2000-2003, Tim's most recent work in the environmental space is the award-winning series Ningaloo Nyinggulu (2023), which he wrote and narrated. Voted a National Living Treasure by the National Trust in 1997, he is also an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In recognition of his contribution to literature and the environment, in 2023 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia.