Island Home
Tim Winton
05 May 2016
9781509816934Synopsis
'I grew up on the world's largest island.'
From his childhood, Tim Winton's relationship with the landscape around him – Australia's swamps and bush, rockpools, seacaves and scrub – has been as vital as any other connection. Whether camping in hidden inlets, walking in the high rocky desert fringe, or diving at Ningaloo Reef, Winton has felt the place seep into him – its rhythms, its dangers, its strange sustenance.
Island Home is the story of how that relationship with the landscape came to be. Charged with love for the huge, besieging force of Australia's wild spaces, this book is a passionate call for their conservation, a memoir that urges us all to feel the ground beneath our feet.
Tim Winton's Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir, is also available.
Both a celebration of Australia's wild places and an impassioned argument for their preservation . . . Island Home is a masterclass . . . chief among his influences, [Winton] says, was the novelist Randolph Stow, who was born in Geraldton, Winton's mother's home town . . . He was a writer "who seemed to feel the country of his birth as if he wore it". The same might be said of Winton himselfTelegraph
Vivid . . . eloquent . . . the real pleasures of Island Home lie in the personal memories he summons up with his novelist's skillsSunday Times
Exquisite . . . Winton's writing - lyrical yet visceral - seems formed by Western Australia's variety, its sparkling rivers and red deserts as much as its colloquialism . . . Like Seamus Heaney's and Ted Hughes's, Winton's language feels a product of the land and the natural way to celebrate it . . . Read itSpectator
