Dirt music

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Dirt Music by Tim Winton is a novel about the power of love.

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded with a man she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. She spends her days in isolated tedium and her nights in a blur of vodka and self-recrimination. Until, early one morning, she sees a shadow drifting up the beach below her house. It is Luther Fox, an outcast, a man on the run from his own past. And now here he is stepping into Georgie's life. He brings hope, maybe even love, but also danger . . .

'Compelling' Independent
'Beautiful' Sunday Telegraph

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Booker Prize nominee Winton crafts the story of a wife, unsure of her role after marrying a rich widower, who launches a passionate affair with the local poacher. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The stunning new narrative by Australian writer Winton (The Riders, nominated for the Booker), a tale of three characters' perilous journey into the Australian wilderness in efforts to escape and atone for their pasts, may just be his breakthrough American publication. At 40, Georgie Jutland, former nurse, inveterate risk-taker, incipient alcoholic and lifelong rebel against her prominent family, has moved in with widowed lobster fisherman Jim Buckridge, "the uncrowned prince" of the western seaside community of White Point. Although Georgie devotes herself to Jim's two young sons, their relationship is uneasy and somehow empty. When she's drawn to shamateur (fish poacher) Luther Fox, who breaks the law to keep his mind from tragic memories, the lives of all three begin to unravel. Lu, the lone survivor of a disreputable family of musicians who specialized in dirt music (country blues), is a memorable character, vulnerable and appealing despite his many flaws. When the White Point community resorts to violence against him, he heads into the tropic wilderness of Australia's northern coast, and the plot begins to challenge CBS's Survivor. With masterly economy and control, Winton unfurls a story of secrets, regrets and new beginnings. His prose, sprinkled with regional vernacular, combines cool dispassion and lyric concision. Geography and landscape are palpable elements: as the narrative progresses, the atmosphere shifts from the austere monotony of a seacoast battered by wind into spectacular gorge country, the bare desolation of the desert and the terrible heat of the tropics. But it's each character's inner landscape that Winton authoritatively traverses with his unerring map of the heart. 7-city author tour. (May 15) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

Australian Winton's seventh novel, seven years in the making, is an exhilarating multilayered amalgam of withering satire and beguiling character creation-a more than worthy successor to his critically acclaimed Cloudstreet (1992) and The Riders (1995). The setting is fictional White Point, a fishing village on the western coast of Australia where a recent lobster boom has created a number of raffish, hard-drinking nouveaux riches. One of the more respectable of them is widower Jim Buckridge, who lives in something very like splendor with his two teenaged sons and his 40-year-old mistress Georgie Jutland, a former nurse, and a fugitive of sorts, from her own wealthy (and troubled) family. Winton has a fine time skewering the "White Pointers'" pretensions, while patiently revealing the present and past influences that shape stoical Jim and restless Georgie-whose relationship is thrown into more confusing relief when Georgie plays Catherine to the Heathcliff of itinerant fish-poacher and failed band musician Luther Fox, who completes the trifecta of major characters. All three have suffered traumatic loss or violence, or both (in Luther's case, it's a comic-horrible history of family maimings and deaths that's positively Dickensian). All three make heroic and farcical efforts to shed the shackles of the past and reinvent themselves. Winton presents this uniquely textured fable of growth and change as a boisterous comedy, whose principals are surrounded by a garrulous Australian chorus of vivid supporting characters ("Beaver," the shady video-store owner with a newly purchased Vietnamese wife, may be the best of a marvelously scurvy lot). All this against a rich backdrop whose landscape and climate are evoked with muscular imagistic precision (as a cyclone approaches, "Lightning bleaches the trees and a waterspout rises like an angry white root from the dirt-coloured sea"). A terrific novel. Winton's best yet. Author tour