Island Home A Landscape Memoir

“I grew up on the world’s largest island.” This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton’s beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir of Australia’s unique landscape, and how that singular place has shaped him and his writing.

For over 30 years, Winton has written novels in which the natural world is as much a living presence as any character. What is true of his work is also true of his life: from boyhood, his relationship with the world around him — rock pools, sea caves, scrub, and swamp — was 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, with its rhythms, its dangers, its strange sustenance, 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.

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

“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

"Insightful and vibrant...A love song to Australia." Guardian

The writer explores his beloved Australia in a memoir that is "a delight to read and] a call to arms . . . It beseeches us to revere the land that sustains us" (Guardian).

From boyhood, Tim 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, the prize-winning author of Breath, Eyrie, and The Shepherd's Hut, among other acclaimed titles.

Tim Winton has published over two dozen books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into 28 languages. He has received the Miles Franklin Award four times and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Island Home is his first work of memoir published in the United States. He lives in Western Australia.