Island Home - by Tim Winton (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir of Australia's unique landscape, and how that singular place has shaped Tim Winton and his writing.

From boyhood, Winton's relationship with the world around him--rock pools, sea caves, scrub, and swamp--has been as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets, walking in high rocky desert, diving in reefs, bobbing in the sea between surfing sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, and learned to see landscape as a living process. In Island Home, Winton brings this landscape--and its influence on the island nation's identity and art--vividly to life through personal accounts and environmental history.

Wise, rhapsodic, exalted--in language as unexpected and wild as the landscape it describes--Island Home is a brilliant, moving portrait of Australia from one of its finest writers.

From boyhood, Winton's relationship with the world around him--rock pools, sea caves, scrub, and swamp--has been as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets, walking in high rocky desert, diving in reefs, bobbing in the sea between surfing sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, and learned to see landscape as a living process. In Island Home, Winton brings this landscape--and its influence on the island nation's identity and art--vividly to life through personal accounts and environmental history.

Wise, rhapsodic, exalted--in language as unexpected and wild as the landscape it describes--Island Home is a brilliant, moving portrait of Australia from one of its finest writers.

Review Quotes

Praise for Tim Winton

"Winton, one of Australia's most acclaimed novelists, excels at conveying the shadowy side of his country's beauty."--New York Times

Praise for Island Home

"Insightful and vibrant . . . In part a love song to Australia and also an attempt to trace how this love affair began . . . Island Home is a delight to read: Winton's words chink like loose change, a foreign currency, mysterious. But more than anything, the book is a call to arms, a manifesto. It beseeches us to revere the land that sustains us, crying out to us for help."--Guardian

"Lyrical and artistic . . . The evocative beauty of Island Home is not to be denied.""--Foreword Reviews

"Winton's Australia is teeming and brimming and shrieking and squawking with life."--Sydney Morning Herald

"Like Wordsworth, Winton understands and feels the 'abiding power' of certain places. . . . The writer of memoir can be triumphantly personal, quixotic, eccentric, risky, and daring. In Island Home, Winton is all of these. This most exquisite of prose writers eases stylistic discipline out a notch or two. . . . The last chapter of this inspiring, sometimes painfully frank, wonderful memoir is called 'Paying Respect, ' and . . . its clarion call is Blakean: everything that lives is holy."--Australian Book Review

"Island Home is a powerful and poetic read, an expression of Winton's intense love of the land and the sea, and for Australia's unique flora and fauna."--Weekend Herald (NZ)