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About The Book

Winner of The Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Christina Stead Award, WA Premier’s Book of the Year, Book Data/ABA Book of the Year Award, Goodreading Award-Readers Choice 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.

About The Author

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Tim Winton grew up on the coast of Western Australia, where he continues to live. He is the author of eighteen books. His epic novel Cloudstreet was adapted for the theater and has been performed around the world. His two most recent novels, Dirt Music and The Riders, were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award three times, and in 1998 the Australian National Trust declared Winton a national living treasure. The Turning has already won the 2005 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Scribner (November 25, 2002)
  • Length: 416 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780743234443

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Raves and Reviews

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.

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.

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

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

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More books from this author: Tim Winton