Set in Western Australia, an area Winton knows very well, the novel is redolent with the beautiful though unforgiving landscape, and the people who live in it.

In her essay about Winton’s writing, Bron Sibree writes: ‘For Tim Winton stories are like splinters. Slivers of the surrounding terrain that lodge themselves under his skin, nagging him forward, until he’s given them life and form.’

This is certainly true of Dirt Music. Sibree quotes Winton himself, who explains that ‘the novel has existed only as a series of handwritten notebooks. I was going to work every day and I was working on them, and they were the book, but they weren’t a story. I started travelling in the North because I could just smell something. Like the smell of rain.’

Eventually, the story came together. It’s a magnificent novel.

“If I had a single mentor who guided me into my writing life – or at any rate encouraged me – it wasn’t any of my teachers, wonderful though they were, or any of my university colleagues in the years to come, but my grandmother … Along with articles of clothing she’d sewed or knitted for me, my grandmother gave me books for Christmas and my birthday, year after year …’

Without comparing myself in any way to JCO, it took me straight back to my own childhood and my grandmother who used to give me books. Nana loved going to auctions and having the odd bid (a bit like the Queen Mother having a flutter at the track), and one of the things she used to bid on were lots of old books – for me. And not any kind of weary old books, but books bound in leather, books with embossed spines and faded ribbon markers, and classics such as The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (which still has tucked among its pages a very bad poem written by myself in turquoise ink in 1980).

Unlike JCO who grew up with hardly books to speak of in the farmhouse of her early childhood (not even a Bible), my own farm home had a modest shelf of books. My mother, who is a very practical woman, always believed that it was better to borrow books from the library than buy them.

So it was with enormous delight that, at about age 13, when my aunt and uncle Margaret and Daniel Curlett were moving overseas for an indefinite period, they left several boxes of books at our house – and I was allowed to read any of them I wanted. The excitement!

Like my sensible mother, I get my books from the library these days, mainly because books are so expensive to buy new; yet also, there are so many wonderful books being published all the time that it would simply be too difficult to choose only one to buy when I’ve got the choice of thousands in our new Auckland Supercity system – 55 libraries, as the literature boasts.

from Burning the Days, by James Salter.

growing up down-under with my kids
a found poem, bits and pieces plucked
from Tina Shaw’s novel, City of Reeds

crushed onion weed lies heavily
on a summer’s breeze
roman sandals and scabbed knees
games beneath the oak trees
elastics and skipping
boys brutal with motorised toy cars
the swing in the pepper tree
legs hooked around the rope
sitting on the top of the tyre
rain water and mosquito larvae and
rotting leaves swinging with pigtails
on the gate of your childhood
a cabbage tree leans
into a stark blue sky
the lanquid heat of summer
redolent with manuka
eleven years old and walking the bush track
in sandshoes shorts
‘stay together’ ‘safety in a group’
have you got the bandages?
the astringent smell of mudflats
assaults your face
running hair flying feet
tapping along the concrete path
screeching ‘mum mum, she took my dolly’
in winter river fog hanging fat and heavy
round the lamp-posts and
the trunks of trees
in summer waiting for your dad
cotton shorts and broderie anglaise blouse
hanging off the gate
like it might support you
for ever

This is such a wonderful novel. I was amazed by the amount of physical detail, especially the changing weather the widow has to survive, and how she lives in the wilderness. I suspect the author must have done a lot of camping! How else would she know what it feels like to be in a night-time forest so black you can only feel your way forward by scent?

Adamson, who is 46, spent 10 years writing The Outlander.

The Indian chap at the station approached my van looking somewhat bemused. He had a little trouble finding out which switches to press to get the indicators and lights going, so it all took a little longer than it might normally with a modern vehicle.

And did the van pass the WOF? Nope. But then, I wasn’t expecting it to. The good news is that there were only four minor things needing to be fixed – no problemo.

Coming back, as I neared the roundabout, a flashing ambulance was coming up from behind. I took the van quickly through the roundabout, indicated, and pulled over. Just in time. The ambulance sped us, giving a toot in thanks.