A review by daveburton
Island Home by Tim Winton

5.0

Touching and powerful, 'Island Home' is a simultaneously soothing and challenging snapshot of contemporary Australia in its wholeness: its beauty, its past, its failings and its future. Written with Winton's trademark prose, the language often feels like the lyrics of a forgotten but familiar song. Some passages beg for second and third readings. It's a necessary book for all Australians, particularly for those of us who reside in metropolitan areas. It reminds us of who we are. One of the first lines: 'I grew up on the world's largest island', presents a simple fact as a forgotten truth, and in doing so begins to change the reader's perception of home. For me, it conjured feelings of the sacred, and in some sense healed scars I didn't know I had. It grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me back down to the ancient earth in which I was born.