The remarkable true stories in The Boy Behind the Curtain reveal an intimate and rare view of Tim Winton’s imagination at work and play. A chronicler of sudden turnings, brutal revelations and tender sideswipes, Tim Winton has always been in the business of trouble. In his novels chaos waits in the wings and ordinary people are ambushed by events and emotions beyond their control. But as these extraordinarily powerful memoirs show, the abrupt and the headlong are old familiars to the author himself, for in many ways his has been a life shaped by havoc. In The Boy Behind the Curtain Winton reflects on the accidents, traumatic and serendipitous, that have influenced his view of life and fuelled his distinctive artistic vision. On the unexpected links between car crashes and religious faith, between surfing and writing, and how going to the wrong movie at the age of eight opened him up to a life of the imagination. And in essays on class, fundamentalism, asylum seekers, guns and the natural world he reveals not only the incidents and concerns that have made him the much-loved writer he is, but some of what unites the life and the work. By turns impassioned, funny, joyous, astonishing, this is Winton’s most personal book to date, an insight into the man who’s held us enthralled for three decades and helped us reshape our view of ourselves. Behind it all, from risk-taking youth to surprise-averse middle age, has been the crazy punt of staking everything on becoming a writer.

Jerra and his best mate Sean set off in a beaten-up old VW to go camping on the coast. Jerra's friends and family want to know when he will finish university, and when he will find a girl. But they don't understand about Sean's mother, Jewel, or the bush, or the fish with the pearl. They think he needs a job but what Jerra is searching for is more elusive. Only the sea, and perhaps the old man who lives in a shack beside it, can help.

'I grew up on the world’s largest island.' This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton’s beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how Australia's unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. Wise, rhapsodic, exalted – Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country shapes us.

An exhilarating new book from Australia’s most acclaimed writer Tim Winton is Australia’s most decorated and beloved literary novelist. Short-listed twice for the Booker Prize and the winner of a record four Miles Franklin Awards for Best Australian Novel, he has a gift for language virtually unrivaled among English-language novelists. His work is both tough and tender, primordial and new—always revealing the raw, instinctual drives that lure us together and rend us apart.      In Eyrie, Winton crafts the story of Tom Keely, a man struggling to accomplish good in an utterly fallen world. Once an ambitious, altruistic environmentalist, Keely now finds himself broke, embroiled in scandal, and struggling to piece together some semblance of a life. From the heights of his urban high-rise apartment, he surveys the wreckage of his life and the world he’s tumbled out of love with. Just before he descends completely into pills and sorrow, a woman from his past and her preternatural child appear, perched on the edge of disaster, desperate for help.      When you’re fighting to keep your head above water, how can you save someone else from drowning? As Keely slips into a nightmarish world of con artists, drug dealers, petty violence, and extortion, Winton confronts the cost of benevolence and creates a landscape of uncertainty. Eyrie is a thrilling and vertigo-inducing morality tale, at once brutal and lyrical, from one of our finest storytellers.

Thirteen-year-old Lockie Leonard is new in town and has nothing going for him except for the fact that he's a hot-shot surfer. He falls in love with the beautiful Vicki and, amazingly, she likes him too. Suddenly Lockie is famous and popular, but he still has a lot to learn about love.

'Tim Winton is the real thing: a writer who can photograph a thought and pluck out the beat of a soul on a washing line' - "Scotland on Sunday". In this, Tim Winton's first collection of short stories, the world he paints is often harsh and disturbing, inhabited by isolated, unforgiving characters. It is a world at once familiar, filled with the trappings of home and family, and yet also strangely twisted; a world where casual brutality and unexpected death are never far from the surface. Evident in a young girl's violent temper once the eggs she has so jealously guarded finally hatch, or in the careless indifference of the woman stepping over a soldier's spreadeagled body, Tim Winton's world is a place where dysfunction and disorder constantly threaten the equilibrium. But there is compassion and beauty there too - whether it's in the brush of a father's hand against his young son's cheek, or the neighbours who wait patiently to celebrate the arrival of a new baby. 'Winton is boisterous and lyrical by turns; his sense of sentiment is unerringly accurate, his characters unforgettable. The emotional control exercised over his anarchic world puts Winton in the top drawer of Australian fiction' - "Daily Telegraph". 'Winton's compassionate and humorous writing is nothing short of magnificent. If you can imagine Neighbours taken over by the writing team of John Steinbeck and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you're close' - "Time Out".

There's nothing straightforward in Lockie Leonard's life right now. Dumped by his girlfriend, he's back to being the loneliest kid in town until, that is, he meets Egg - who turns out to be the weirdest human being he's ever met. On top of all that, Lockie decides to save the planet; at least the bit of it he lives on. Then he falls in love again, which would be OK except she's younger and surfs better. Can a thirteen-year-old surfrat have a headbanger for a best mate? Will he save the town from vile pollution? Will his love outlast the school term? Another ripper set of circumstances to carry us through the life of Lockie Leonard; Scumbuster!

Featuring the tales about ordinary people from ordinary places, this title describes turnings of different kinds: second thoughts, changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, abrupt transitions. It paints a picture of a world where people struggle against the weight of their past and challenge the lives they have made for themselves.

An epic novel of determination, survival, and the limits of the human spirit. This is Tim Winton as you’ve never read him before. Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place – middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they’re not alone. So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.

A searing play about the way in which we try to own our dead, and the way in which they come to own us. A year after the death of their son Jack in an early-morning car crash, Adam and Mary Mansfield are still struggling with what happened. Adam has sold his winery, and his trips to the beach house have become more frequent – anything to avoid Mary's silent suffering. One day he encounters a young woman he used to employ as a cellarhand. June knows her way around a vineyard, and she also knows a lot about Jack. It's a story she needs to share with Adam, the story of his son's final hours. Set above the rocky headlands of the south coast of Western Australia, between forest and sea, Tim Winton's third play untangles a domestic heartbreak that has morphed into mythology, in a landscape inhabited by ghosts.

Lockie's survived his first year of high school, settling into a new town and his first mad love affair - it's all behind him; he made it! Sadly, the world of weirdness hasn't finished with him yet. His little brother's hormones have kicked in, his baby sister refuses to walk or talk - but eats anything in sight - his Dad brings home a sheep and his Mum seems to have checked out of the here and now. As Lockie's world turns upside down, he learns that life is never as simple as it seems and along the way, finds out a lot more about himself than he ever realised was there.

Abel Jackson's boyhood belongs to a vanishing world.  On an idyllic stretch of coast whose waters teem with fish, he lives a simple, tough existence.  It's just him and his mother in the house at Longboat Bay, but Abel has friends in the sea, particularly the magnificent old groper he meets when diving. As the years pass, things change, but one thing seems to remain constant: the greed of humans.  When the modern world comes to his patch of sea, Abel wonders what can stand in its way. Blueback is a deceptively simple allegory about a boy who matures through fortitude, and finds wisdom through living in harmony with all forms of life.  It is a beautiful distillation of Winton's art and concerns. 'In true fable style, this is a simple story, but one so beautiful, poignant and moving it is impossible to ignore.' Daily Telegraph 'Winton . . . convince[s] us of the preciousness of our oceans not through lectures but through his characters' steady wonder.' New York Times

Alone in her farmhouse at night, Georgie hears noises out on the highway – car doors, voices, weeping. She's recently widowed and a little spooked. It's not just her – the entire world feels wrong, as if the land beneath her feet is dying. It hasn't rained for years. The river has dried up and the olive grove is beginning to wither around her. Then a figure emerges from the darkness. A man, an Aborigine, seeking help. He says he needs petrol. His sister is out in the car, screaming. They've been sleeping in it for days. Can Georgie trust them? And what to do when guests settle in and show no inclination to move on? Bitter and funny, Signs of Life is a story about people with uncertain futures navigating with shreds of the past. 'A play that will touch your heart and ignite your imagination.' Kate Cherry, director

Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire. Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans -- running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth -- bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.

Tim Winton is at his most viscerally powerful in this boy's vision of the world: the dreamed, the lived, the imagined, and the sharp consolations of faith.