Island Home

“Winton gives us an aerial view of humanity’s situation and its effect on those with whom we share the planet… . At a time when the Paris agreement on combating climate change is being undermined by our current administration, when wild lands are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the ravages of global warming and fossil fuel development, Island Home is more than a memoir. It’s a call to arms that is at once distinctively local and painfully global.”

“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: Tim 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.”

“There is a sense at the start of Man Booker Prize short-listed author Winton’s personal and cultural panorama of Australia that one has traveled too far off the map and become hopelessly lost in his transporting, place-specific language. Indigenous particularities feed Winton’s life story and prose, and the landscape reads as alien and all-encompassing in its beauty, enormity, and seclusion… . The world’s largest island deserves nothing less than Winton’s beautifully curated, intimate, environmentally sensitive history.”

“In Island Home, Winton trains his acute and lucid gaze on Australia’s landscape and people, on himself and on our wounded planet. The connections are at once personal and universal… . If you haven’t read his work, I envy your journey of discovery.”

“Like Wordsworth, Tim 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.”