Guest review by Nick Hodges: THIS BIRDING LIFE by Stephen Moss

 

"Moss can see an everyday bird and take pleasure from it - every day. His enthusiasm is catching: boundless."

Photograph with king parrot
by Judith Ramage

Nick Hodges is an Englishman living in Australia. He is a teacher and freelance journalist concentrating on Travel and Nature. His work has been published in Britain's Sunday Times, The Times Educational Supplement and the Tourist Board magazine, In Britain. Down Under, his work has appeared in leading newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Sun Herald. He has recently completed 20 years of writing a monthly Nature Notes article for a Sydney newspaper. He has designed and taught adult courses on The Birds of Sydney.

Nick Hodges is not a twitcher. Well - not really.

The book was old but still in good condition. I opened it and the phrase 'birds are so beautiful' grabbed me. That's right, I thought; that's why I like them.

The author, Stephen Moss, writer, broadcaster, TV producer and naturalist, knows what he's talking about. This Birding Life is a collection of essays on birds and birders which appeared many years ago at monthly intervals in The Guardian.

My copy had been half obscured at the back of a bookshelf and unread for a long time. I leafed through it and was struck by the similarities: I, too, had written once a month about nature. My pieces were published over a period of 20 years in a Sydney newspaper. But whereas Moss had written about birds my Nature Notes were more general: Kangaroos and Crocodiles as well as Cockatoos and Kookaburras.

I sat down, and read for several absorbing hours until I'd finished it: the book was that good.

Once, in northern Australia, 80 km from anywhere, I sat on the dusty bank of a tired, half-empty creek. Next to me was a naked tree, gaunt with what passes for winter in those parts. I waited. And waited. Then it happened. A great cloud passed over the sun before descending to immediately clothe the whole tree in what resembled a quivering mass of breeze-blown, green leaves. Winter became summer. And they weren't leaves - but Budgerigars! Thousands of them!

Corny perhaps to say it was a truly unforgettable sight. But it was. Who could I tell? Who would understand? Stephen Moss would.

Reading his book I felt a strong affinity with the man. When he sees his first Blue-cheeked Bee-eater he claims it to be 'the most breathtakingly beautiful bird I have ever seen: a vision of rich, warm colours somehow out of place in this harsh, grey landscape'. I know exactly what he means. That Bee-eater will stay with him always. And his first Little Bittern? 'One of the great moments of my birding life'. One suspects he means his entire life.

This Birding Life is divided into seven parts: Growing Up, Spreading my Wings, My Local Patch, Birding Britain, Birding Abroad etc. Each containing several essays. When you've read the lot you've also read much of the story of the author's life.

Stephen Moss's prose is straightforward but effective. His descriptions are illuminating. He says that Yellow Wagtails resemble flying lemons - and he's right. They do! On an offshore island of breeding seabirds he writes, 'The Puffins continued loafing about, posing for photographs until the boat came'. And he's right. They do! On Ivory Gulls, he writes, 'despite its name this species is not ivory coloured at all. A better name might be 'Persil Gull: its plumage is almost whiter than white'.

There are essays on birds seen on country walks, in car parks, while commuting and on his regularly visited local patch. There are essays about birds in childhood and on birders themselves, great men of ornithology. There are essays on bird names: Thekla Lark, Eleonora's Falcon, Montagu's Harrier. Why are they named thus? Who were these people? How do you pronounce Adouin's Gull? And what exactly is a twitcher? And a mass twitch? It's all here.

Have you ever had a good look at a house sparrow? Moss can see such an everyday bird and take pleasure from it - every day. His enthusiasm is catching; boundless.

Being a birder is a reason to visit new, maybe-unknown spots: Minsmere Nature Reserve, for example, is surely one of Britain's most lovely places. Ditto, Cley Reserve in Norfolk; or the Hebrides. The very mention of these places inspires awe among birders. Me too. Stephen Moss visits all of these destinations in order to see different and new species of birds. He writes about these hallowed birding spots with what amounts to reverence. These are the places to go in order see rarities and possibly 100 species in a day. Yes: 100!

The book has no illustrations or photographs. However, Moss's prose carries the day. A word of warning: be careful if you check out his birds online. The Blue-cheeked Bee-eater for example. You'll be so dazzled by the colours you'll find yourself considering air fares to the bird's homeland. And air fares to Africa aren't cheap. But with or without illustrations the book is a decided tick.

This Birding Life is published by Aurum.

See also: 

12 Birds to Save your Life - Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett, reviewed by Linda Sargent

Bird Cottage by Eva Meijer, translated by Antoinette Fawcett, reviewed by Daniel Hahn

A Sweet, Wild Note: What we Hear when the Birds Sing by Richard Smyth, reviewed by Dawn Finch

EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Simon Mason on THE BROKEN SHORE and TRUTH by Peter Temple

"As rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror ..."

Simon Mason is a writer of fiction. At first he wrote books for adults, then books for children, which grew up at roughly the same rate as his own children, and now he is back writing books for adults again.

His latest books are crime thrillers featuring a mismatched pair of detectives in Oxford. The first, A Killing in November (shortlisted for the Golden Dagger) was a Sunday Times crime book of the month, and so was the second, The Broken Afternoon. The third, Lost and Never Found, was long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. 

He has pursued a parallel career as a publisher. From 2012 to 2018 he was Managing Director of the children’s publisher, David Fickling Books, where he worked with many wonderful writers, including Philip Pullman, whose book of essays Daemon Voices (2016), he edited.

Arriving on the scene late (he was fifty when his first book was published), Peter Temple was instantly a writer of thoroughly expert literary thrillers, stylish, intelligent, humorous and dark. Words were important to him, his sprightly, stylish prose reminiscent of Chandler, but funnier (‘Gerry gave me the look chefs reserve for three-day-old fish’). The real world was important too; a former journalist, he knew how things work – newspapers, information-gathering agencies, politics – and also how the past lives in the present: ‘the past had suckers, it attached itself to everything.’ His characters, like those of Dickens, are vivid animations, distinguished by the marks of their individuality; his speciality was in damaged men. Scene-setting is always vivid and deeply felt, in particular of Temple’s adored-abhorred Melbourne, with its industrial lots, big-business office complexes, weatherboard slums and gated mansions. And all these literary virtues combine in his two last, loosely connected novels, The Broken Shore (2005) and Truth (2009), which outgrew his chosen genre.

The Broken Shore won the CWA Gold Dagger but is altogether meatier and more highly wrought than the average crime novel, a study in evil, a hard look at Australia and a moving portrait of a damaged, somehow-surviving man.

Melbourne detective Joe Cashin has been shunted to undemanding duties in remote Cromarty, his hometown, as he convalesces from a near-fatal attack which killed his partner. He would like to be free to pursue the Quixotic renovation of his old family farm, to walk his dogs, to reflect on what Cromarty has become – a coastal town half dead industry, half new holiday homes – but the local ‘squire’, last bastion of Cromarty’s former industrial wealth, is found murdered in his mansion, apparently killed for his watch, which, a few days later, a couple of Aboriginal kids are caught trying to sell. It seems a straightforward case. It isn’t.

Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger. Australia itself is a broken shore, a blasted heath of ruins, a desolate place for desolate characters. Damage has been done by the violence of hardscrabble poverty, privileged wealth and deep-rooted racism. Where is the soul of Australia now? In Cashin? In Dove, Cashin’s down-trodden Aboriginal partner? Or in Dave the Swaggie, a ‘ghost’, an ‘alien’ (‘did Dave ever have an earthly identity?). Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?

Truth is as rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror. It all happens around Stephen Villani, Head of Homicide in Melbourne, that ‘ghostly’ city of foul deeds. After a cameo role in The Broken Shore, Villani here takes centre stage, conducting investigations into two separate murders, separating acrimoniously from his wife, having a lust-charged affair with an eye-catching television journalist, trying to find his runaway daughter, worrying that a certain event in his past is going to return to destroy him. He flirts recklessly with danger, not only in his violent encounters on the street but in the swanky living rooms of politicians courting him for higher office, and in his childhood home in the hills, where his ex-combat father is refusing to evacuate in the face of rapidly spreading fires.

It is, among other things, a novel of memories, Villani conjuring up a city built of his own experiences, reflecting on what it has all meant, struggling to recall things buried too deep, things that lie ‘just beyond the breakers, in the deep water, in the dark, slippery, moving kelp of the mind.’ His project is to understand – or at least to get into view the unintelligible: ‘There was a meaning here. There was something speaking to them and they did not know the language.’ Temple’s own language is extraordinary: demotic, urgent, elusive, it demands concentration and delivers constant shocks of the new. He avoids explanation like the plague. He loves to ramify, can’t resist an extra layer, a wounding complication. Huge numbers of people appear and disappear, many of them suspect, and the investigation leads not towards their crimes but into their lives. It progresses crabwise, slow and opaque. In retrospect the solutions are simple, we have simply been hustled past them onto other fascinating things. It is an extraordinary achievement.

The Broken Shore and Truth are published by Riverrun.

See also Linda Newbery's review of Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman

Guest review by Jon Appleton: THE WEEKEND by Charlotte Wood

 

" ... And yet the hunger remains, the appetite for life. What’s the best you can hope for? That’s what The Weekend is about. A hungry novel."  

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor living in London. He is a regular contributor to Writers Review.

‘Nobody wants you when you’re old. You have to shore things up before this point. You have to face up to the future, to the worst possibilities, you have to prepare yourself. Anticipate, adapt, accept.’

You might argue that reaching your eighth decade precludes you from having to learn and harness jargonistic alliterative slogans. (Although strictly speaking this is assonance, right?) But events such as the loss of a partner, a child, a friend can prove so destabilising that you’re reduced, in some respects, to learning your A, B, C all over again.

That’s where we find long-time friends Jude, the restaurateur, Wendy, the academic and Adele, the actress, in the aftermath of their close friend Sylvie’s death. The three women are spending a hot Australian Christmas at Sylvie’s home (in the absence of Sylvie’s partner) to clear it for sale and the conclusion of a chapter of their lives.

More oppressive than a dead friend is the inclinator, the platform that elevates – infantilises? passengers and baggage from the ground level to house level. Oh, and Wendy’s poor, dear dog Finn, who soils himself and inconveniences fastidious Jude but is perhaps all Wendy has left of Sylvie. His life so far beyond comfort and opportunity that it surely would better be ended with mercy and kindness. Gulp.

As the women set about their tasks, they engage and remember and rewrite history. They pride themselves on the sophistication of their inner lives and scorn those who lack such vivid interiors.

They might be old but they have expectations. You might not want lost looks, lost love, men or sex, The Weekend argues. What you really want, reasonably, is work. And money. Others might think you’re past it, somehow an encumbrance or liability, but these women know you can still make certain demands. You can trust a lived-in body, you know how it works – ‘you left it alone and it sorted itself out’.

So demanding of the world beyond them, and yet, a lot of the time it seems the best they can offer each other is tolerance or forbearance. Except, of course, when push comes to shove, as it does at the brisk ending. But if you can’t be brisk in old age, when can you?

Charlotte Wood is an Australian writer whose reputation is enhanced with each new publication; The Weekend, her last-but-one novel, was published here with a splash last year and deservedly so.

You’ll learn a lot about contemporary Australian life. You’ll understand where Australia has emerged from. (The surnames alone – Wendy Steegmuller, Adele Antoniades - are telling.) But interestingly, the cultural references are British – no mention of the Miles Franklin Award, instead the Booker Prize. The women reference the Mamas and the Papas from their youth, not The Seekers.

There’s always been a tension in Australia that anyone with ambition is punching above their weight – ‘the tall poppy syndrome’, it was called. How much worse is it for the high-flyers now diminished in old age, by themselves, by others, by society?

And yet the hunger remains, the appetite for life. What’s the best you can hope for? That’s what The Weekend is about. A hungry novel. I loved it and recommend it. So will you.

The Weekend is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

More recent choices by Jon:

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart

Guest review by Berlie Doherty: A ROOM MADE OF LEAVES by Kate Grenville

"Grenville is a terrific storyteller and has an unerring sense of descriptive language..."

Berlie Doherty writes novels, plays, stories and poetry for all ages, and is translated into over twenty languages. She has written over 60 books, including her best-selling Street Child and much-loved Blue John, several of which have been dramatised for radio, television and the stage. She has won many awards including the Carnegie Medal twice (Dear Nobody and Granny was a Buffer Girl, both of which were set in Sheffield). Her subjects cover many different genres, from folk and fairy tales, ghost stories and love stories, fantasy and historical fiction to enduring contemporary family novels. She lived in Sheffield for many years and now lives in Edale.

You can visit her website at www.berliedoherty.com  

I only recently came across the Australian author Kate Grenville, through her wonderful book The Secret River, which must be one of the most powerful novels I’ve read in the last few years. Since then I’ve been catching up with her many other novels, and I was really pleased to know that she has recently published a new book, A Room Made of Leaves.

I was a little disconcerted at first when I understood from her preface that Kate Grenville hadn’t in fact written this book, but curated and edited it from an eighteenth century manuscript written by the wife of the infamous John Macarthur, a British soldier serving in a pioneer settlement in New South Wales. Kate Grenville read through the manuscript with some difficulty, as the handwriting was faded in parts and crosshatched to save paper. She says, I have not altered the manuscript in any way …

I was deluded for a short time.

In fact, the whole novel is about truth and deception, pretence and forbearance.

The focus of the novel is the relationship between the real life Elizabeth Macarthur and John Macarthur, known as the pioneer of the wool industry in Australia. He was by all accounts an unpleasant man who had the reputation of being quarrelsome to the point of being vindictive, and was highly ambitious.

As the novel begins, Elizabeth, the daughter of a Cornish clergyman, is clever, wilful, and sexually aware. A moment spent behind the hedge with a young John Macarthur shapes the rest of her life. She is pregnant, and is forced into the deceit of a loveless marriage from which there can be no escape. There is no more seduction, no more romantic love. Before the year is out the Macarthurs travel to Sydney. During the long, dreadful journey on the convict ship Elizabeth gives birth to her baby, who dies. On board the ship, her husband is arrogant, bullying, hateful and uncaring. All this is historically documented.

In a series of letters sent to her cousin and friends in England, the real Elizabeth related the course of the relationship, and the rise to power of her husband. In the novel, her letters are deceits, heavily disguising the emotional truth. Her husband disgusts her in every way, but because he reads her letters, she can only write the opposite.

The heroine is determined to make the most of her new life in the strange, hostile environment she has been brought to. The landscape is scrubby and harsh, with thick clumps of grass like sharp blades. Their crude dwelling is close to where the marines and convicts are placed:

There were times when the screams could be heard all over the settlement …. Hunger and desperation, anger and fear, loss and yearning for home, brought out all that was worst in everyone. It was a place of sniping and slander and barbed rumours ..

Later in the book Elizabeth has a secret sexual relationship with William Dawes, an astronomer and botanist who keeps himself apart from the marines and soldiers. His hideway is the room full of leaves, a place of calm and natural beauty, and here she finds relief from the sterility of her marriage and the loneliness of her situation. In her encounters with him she observes but never comes close to the First Nation women and children who are his frequent visitors.

A Room Full of Leaves is familiar territory to Grenville and her readers. We have visited the settlements before in The Secret River and The Lieutenant – and met some of the characters. Grenville is a terrific storyteller and has an unerring sense of descriptive language. Macarthur’s character is powerfully drawn; he is morally brutal, yet infantile. He has no understanding of his wife, yet she understands him completely. In her quiet way, she controls him.

However, I was disappointed. I didn’t have any real sense of the presence of the First Nations, mostly simply figures who stroll through the settlement and appear and disappear at will. In the same way, the convicts are merely there, as a backdrop, and even Mrs Brown, a convict maid who becomes a companion, tells us little about the unbearable situation that these settlers find themselves in. I also find it hard to believe in Elizabeth’s relationship with Dawes as a love relationship rather than as a sexual one.

Elizabeth herself is resilient and resourceful. In England at that time she could have graced the living-rooms of Jane Austen’s novels. But what does she do every day? What on earth must it be like to adjust to the demands of daily life in that alien landscape? She survives, she’s strong, she makes the most of her life and the farm that she has created. She loves it, in the end. But I don’t feel I know her. The novel has left me in awe of a superb writer, but still hungry.


You can read my review of Hilary McKay’s The Skylarks’ War and Lilo Beil’s Shadow Time Stories in my blog https://berliedoherty.com/category/blog/

A Room Made of Leaves is published by Canongate.

It also features in a recent independent bookseller round-up, Her Story not His Story, by Madeleine Smith of P G Wells in Winchester.

 

Guest review by Rachel Ward: THE LOST MAN by Jane Harper

"A fabulously plotted and absorbing story."

Rachel Ward has written five thrillers for young adults, the first of which, Numbers, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize. Her novels for adults, The Cost of Living and Dead Stock (Sandstone Press) are cosy crime stories set in and around a supermarket; Expiry Date will be published on June 18th . Rachel lives in Bath where she also paints and takes photographs. Twitter: @RachelWardbooks Facebook: Rachel Ward Art

In an isolated part of Australia, two brothers meet at the stockman’s grave, a landmark so old that no one can remember who is buried there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last hope for their middle brother, Cameron. The Bright family’s quiet existence is thrown into grief and anguish. Something had been troubling Cameron. Did he choose to walk to his death? Because if he didn’t, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects…

Many of you will have read The Dry,  Jane Harper’s first crime book which deservedly won numerous awards including the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year 2018. If you thought that couldn’t be topped, The Lost Man gives it a run for its money.

Once again, the bleak sun-scorched outback landscape comes to the fore, providing a lethal environment for anyone caught out in it without shelter. Harper’s descriptions are vivid and compelling.

The book follows Nathan, one of the surviving brothers, who lives in an adjacent farm, as he tries to unpick the tortured family relationships on the main Bright family farm and the events which led to Cameron’s death. All the characters are well drawn and complex. Nathan himself is an outsider within his community and his family and is a fascinating focus for the book.

It is a fabulously plotted and absorbing story. There’s a real sense of menace and despair, as secrets are gradually revealed. The ending is surprising (at least to me) and satisfying.

I’m rationing Jane Harper books, because they are real treats to be relished. I’ve yet to read Force of Nature, and I’m delighted to see that a new book, The Survivors, is due in September. Highly recommended.

The Lost Man is published by Abacus.

See also: The Dry reviewed by Adele Geras

Guest review by Rosemary Hayes: THE SHEPHERD'S HUT by Tim Winton

"A wonderful, acutely observed, tautly-written book from a master storyteller set in a landscape he knows intimately."

Rosemary Hayes' first novel for children, Race Against Time (Penguin) won a national award. Since then she has written over forty books for children in a variety of genres but she particularly enjoys writing both contemporary and historical fiction for young adults. Forgotten Footprints and The Blue Eyed Aborigine are among her recent historical novels and The Mark, Taken, Loose Connections and Payback are stories set in the here and now. She is currently working on a fantasy trilogy for a 9+ readership.

Rosemary worked for Cambridge University Press and then for some years ran her own company, Anglia Young Books, which produced curriculum-related historical stories for primary schools. Now, as well as writing for children, she also runs creative writing courses for adults. She is Patron of Reading at Saffron Walden County High School. See more on her website.

The last few lines of the prologue to this book read: ‘For the first time in my life I know what I want and I have what it takes to get me there. … but it wasn’t always like this. I been through fire to get here. I seen things and done things and had shit done to me you couldn’t barely credit. So be happy for me. And for fucksake don’t get in my way.’

My first reaction as I began reading this book was that it would probably be loved and hated in equal measure and, indeed, there have been a few (a very few) reviews where readers couldn’t get past the bad language of the narrator, a brutalised teenager called Jaxie Clackton, even though his language has a unique rhythm and authenticity. How else would this boy speak, after all? He’s uneducated, his mother has recently died from cancer and his drunken, abusive and sadistic father (the local butcher) beats him mercilessly. Jaxie is a school delinquent mocked by his peers, who call him ‘Horsemeat’, and he spends much of his time wandering about the deadbeat rural settlement of Monkton in Western Australia, close to the highway but backing onto the wheat belt and then the inhospitable and desolate landscape of the Murchison gold fields, settling arguments with other teenagers in the only way he knows – with his fists – and wishing his father dead. A wish that is shockingly fulfilled when Jaxie returns home one evening to find his dad crushed beneath the roo bar on his car because he’d not bothered to use the right equipment to jack it up. ‘Being a cheap bastard is what killed him’ is Jaxie’s comment.

Everyone in the small community knows that Jaxie hated Captain Wankbag (Jaxie’s name for his father) and that the local policeman, ‘that fat ranga with the hissy laugh,’ was his dad’s bestie, so Jaxie doesn’t hang around to be accused of murder. Panicking, he puts together a few essentials and goes on the run, heading first into the wheat belt: ‘Nothing but stubble paddocks far and wide. Everything flat and bare. Shanksing across that country you stick out like a rat on a birthday cake, … houses rare as rocking horse turds.’

Jaxie heads north. There is one good thing in his life and that’s his girlfriend and cousin, Lee, 'the only person in the world who gets me,’ but Lee and her family live in Mt Magnet. It's only a couple of hours by car, but Jaxie has no transport avoids the highway in case he’s hauled in by he police. He sets off to walk across the desolate landscape of goldfields and salt flats to reach her and, as he soon realizes, it is a fool’s errand. It is hot, waterless and vast and although Jaxie is by no means ignorant about survival in the bush – he knows about camping, has a gun and can shoot and butcher meat – he is dangerously ill-equipped for the journey.

Jaxie is brave and devoid of self pity and we follow him as he lurches from one crisis to another, hardly able to see out of his injured eye (a legacy of his father’s brutality) and at one point nearly dying of thirst. He follows an old track to a deserted prospector’s camp where he stays for a while, and then, in a search for salt to preserve a great roo he’s shot, he comes upon a shepherd’s hut, in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a great salt lake. Someone is living there and whoever it is has been there for a while as it is well set up, but there is no sign of a vehicle. Who could possibly survive in this desolate place for any length of time without supplies from the outside world? Suspiciously Jaxie observes the hut through his binoculars, keeping his distance and, he believes, keeping out of sight. But the old man who lives there has already sensed Jaxie’s presence and when they finally confront one another, it is, at first sight, at least, a meeting of two totally contrasting worlds - that of a well-travelled, highly-educated but disgraced Irish priest called Fintan MacGillis and of an illiterate and foul-mouthed teenager from a deadbeat rural settlement.

The oddest of odd couples, then. Jaxie never lets his guard down. No adult, apart from his mum, has shown him any kindness and he is narky and suspicious of this weird old man who talks to himself, reads books and sings. ‘With that accent of his and the way he said things fancy and musical, it was like camouflage and you knew deep down he’d been doing this all his life, hiding in clear sight. He had a boozer’s face but as far as I could see there was nothing to drink out here but rainwater and billy tea. He had skinny legs with ropey blue veins winding up them and his top teeth were plastic and they moved enough to make you seasick. His specs was always on crooked too, one hinge busted and the arm wired on rough as a pig’s tit. And it was clear he was half deaf. Anytime you said something he cocked his head like a kelpie.’

They insult one another, are exasperated with one another, but slowly they create a fragile bond. Jaxie often flares up and threatens to leave, but somehow he never does, in spite of his yearning to get to Lee. Through flashbacks, we learn a lot about Jaxie’s past life, how his relationship with Lee developed and of the abuse he’s suffered, but Fintan remains an enigma. We are never told why he lives here, who brings him supplies at Christmas and Easter (except this Christmas, when no one turned up) or for what crime he is doing penance. Jaxie immediately assumes it is ‘kiddy flddling’ and though Fintan assures him it is not he won’t say much about his background – just a tantalizing hint, here and there.

So, the weeks go by and Jaxie helps the old man with trapping and butchering goats and some of the heavier jobs around the place, giving the reader a well drawn picture of the harshness and tedium of the daily business of keeping alive in the bush. Then, after a furious row with Fintan, Jaxie finally leaves to continue his journey north. However, he has only gone a day’s walk when he makes a shocking discovery that changes everything. From here on the tension really ramps up and after one careless act and fatal indecision we are witness to a tragic conclusion with an extraordinary and heartbreaking description of stubborn loyalty and unexpected tenderness.

Writing in the vernacular is never easy to sustain but Jaxie’s dialogue rings absolutely true throughout and is a wonderful contrast to Fintan’s mellifluous tones. There’s a lot of humour, too, often quite dark and delivered through Jaxie’s one-liners; there's also lyricism, particularly through descriptions of the landscape with its huge skies, its mirages, the changing colours of the salt flats and the rocks, the hostile scrub and the well observed habits of the wildlife. In this Winton captures the essence of the utter isolation and vastness of the place and shows how both Jaxie and Fintan, in their very different ways, are in awe of it.

I have spent a lot of time in Western Australia and I’ve been through one horse towns such as Monkton and flown over the goldfields and salt flats. Winton’s descriptions, through the words of Jaxie and Fintan, are utterly convincing. I was immediately transported back there, seeing, smelling and experiencing it all again.

On the surface, Jaxie is unlovable and inexpressive but we're taken inside his thoughts from time to time - ‘Some nights there was so much feeling in me head I was glad it couldn’t get out. Christ, you could burn a skyscraper down with what’s in me’ - and we cannot help but empathise with him. Despite the rotten hand he’s been dealt Jaxie has soul and we end up loving him and longing for him to survive, to find Lee and ride off into the sunset with her. Though in many ways this is an unremittingly harsh story it is shot through with such bright streaks of perseverance, hope, love, loyalty and humanity that I found it an utterly compelling read - a real page turner. Quite an achievement, given that there are only two main characters.

I have long been an admirer of Tim Winton’s work and in The Shepherd’s Hut he is at his very best. I know I shall go back to it again to savour the rhythm of the writing, the sense of place, brilliantly fleshed out characters, humour and depth of insight. It's a wonderful, acutely observed, tautly-written book from a master storyteller set in a landscape he knows intimately.

The Shepherd's Hut is published by Picador.