Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir
by Tim Winton,
Penguin, $37
West Australian author, surfer and environmentalist Tim Winton has built an impressive bibliography of novels and short story collections. He was first published in the 1980s while still in his 20s but it was 1991's Cloudstreet that saw him noticed by the
literati. With The Riders in 1995 Winton was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and he has won Australia's highly regarded Miles Franklin Award a record four times.
Dirt Music in 2001 and Breath - in which his love of the ocean and surfing are obvious - have enhanced his reputation.
Tim Winton is a wordsmith whose passion for language is evident on every page, along with his keen insight into relationships, both person to person, and with everyday surroundings and nature.
Land's Edge takes us inside his life as a child and as a young man very much under the thrall of his parents, the West Australian coastline, and the big library at his family's bach, a shack in his words, at the mouth of the Greenough River.
This is where Zane Grey, Mark Twain, Somerset Maugham, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and others inspired him. And where his own love of prose took root.
If you're already a Tim Winton fan you'll find Lands Edge inspiring and revealing.
