Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir

On childhood holidays to the western coast, Tim Winton's days followed a joyous rhythm. In the mornings, the sun and surf kept him outside, in the water. In the afternoons, as the horizon wobbled with mirages and the wind came in from the ocean, he was driven inside, to books. In the 'simple, peculiar shack' that his family borrowed each year there was a small library: a room with four walls of books, a world unto itself. In this beautifully delicate memoir, Winton writes about his obsession with what happens where the water meets the shore about diving, dunes, beachcombing and the sense of being on the precarious, wondrous edge of things that haunts his novels. It is a book about the ebb and flow that became a way of life, and that shaped one of our finest writers. 'Both a serial romantic and a truly gifted novelist' Mariella Frostrup, Mail on Sunday

About the Author :
Tim Winton is widely considered one of the greatest living Australian writers. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). In 2023 he was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia for "distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, to conservation, and to environmental advocacy. He lives in Western Australia.

Review :
Winton's exhilarated eulogy to a life lived from boyhood to manhood by and on the beach . . . Imagine the ideal short memoir of a perfect long day lived between land, sky and sea; this is as good as it gets. Wonderfully stirring . . . The great pleasure of Land's Edge is not just the dissection of his own love of the sea but also the flint-sharp evocation: he can fill your nostrils with the salty breeze. . . His is a book to read and reread . . . its reflections are beautiful, urgent and filled with awe. The beach, the "verandah" at the edge of the continent, is half-fantasy, half-horror story. Winton is brilliant at exploring this ambiguity . . . I gobbled up this short but shimmering book in one windswept afternoon. A timeless meditation on place and the intimate affirmation of a writer's life lived on his own terms. In this slim, poetic memoir, Winton picks apart his lifelong attraction to the ocean . . . compelling . . . the ocean's twin allure of fear and freedom is what Winton captures so well. A lovely and gently humorous book' Winton grew up on Australia's west coast . . . He has been in love with the ocean ever since and writes about it with an almost religious reverence . . . Land's Edge will help Winton fans understand how the ocean dominates his imaginative world. What really makes Winton stand out amongst his peers is the diamond-tipped precision of his descriptive writing, and in Land's Edge we get a gloriously concentrated dose of it . . . there's a passage about diving with eight-metre sharks that fairly takes the breath away' A lovely, lyrical memoir Tim Winton's swirling prose mirrors his giddy fascination with the sea . . . the book basks in the hear and dreamy haze of life on the coast of Western Australia. A masterful memoir that evokes the power of the sea to ease anxieties and kick-start joyfulness . . . universal and timeless.