num_pages: 465
description: Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman, a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back on music. There's too much emotion in it, too much memory and pain. One morning Fox is observed poaching by Georgie Jutland. Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life and home of Jim Buckridge, the most prosperous fisherman in the area and a man who loathes poachers, Fox above all. But she's never fully settled into Jim's grand house on the water or into the inbred community with its history of violent secrets. After Georgie encounters Fox, her tentative hold on conventional life is severed. Neither of them would call it love, but they can't stay away from each other no matter how dangerous it is, and out on White Point it is very dangerous.  Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, Dirt Music is a love story about people stifled by grief and regret; a novel about the odds of breaking with the past and about the lure of music. Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is "anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity." Even in the wild, Luther cannot escape it. There is, he discovers, no silence in nature.  Ambitious, perfectly calibrated, Dirt Music resonates with suspense and supercharged emotion, and it confirms Tim Winton's status as the preeminent Australian novelist of his generation.
language: English
title: Dirt Music
titlecomplete: Dirt Music
characters: Jim Buckridge, Georgie Jutland
genres: Australia, Book Club, 21st Century, Literary Fiction, Novels, Drama, Literature, Romance, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 13903
places: Western Australia, Australia
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Booker Prize, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: New South Wales Premier's Literary Award
category: Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Miles Franklin Literary Award, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Western Australian Premier's Book Award, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Kiriyama Prize
category: Fiction
publisher: Macmillan Pub Ltd