AustLit

'In all of Gail Jones’s writing, words bump up against images from art and cinema – visual keys to convey what narrative may not. Her working-class childhood in rural and remote Western Australia had offered little in the way of literature, but visually there was much to fire her imagination. She remembers the pearl-diving industry of coastal Broome, especially the mother shells that shone like moonlight.' (Introduction)

'The Shepherd’s Hut is the outrageous story of a headlong bolt through the remotest outback by a charismatic gun-toting teenager determined to reunite with his girlfriend half a continent away. It’s Winton’s 29th book and the closest thing he has written to a full-dress action-adventure thriller.' (Introduction)

'In the winter of 1962, 17-year-old Radford is brought from London to Goodwin Manor, somewhere in the English Midlands. While we don’t know why Radford has been brought here, we learn that the manor is an institution for boys who have been “found by trouble”. He is taken to Teddy, the eccentric, kindly man in charge, who tells him practically nothing about the place, and who banishes another boy to the chicken coops to make room for him. Radford promptly gets swept up in the commotion of this lark as crowds of boys clear out the boy’s things and set them back up in the coops, and his first impression of the other residents, these marauding bodies and “sallow figures scoffing and competing”, is of a whirlwind of activity.' (Publication summary)