THE SHEPHERD'S HUT by Tim Winton

This has to be the best book for me of 2018, hands down, without a flinch of doubt. The man is a genius, possibly one of the best things ever to come out of Australia? Certainly West Australia! His love of the harsh WA environment oozes through every page - the landscape, the weather, the air the characters breathe, the vast expanse of the outdoors. And his characters - in this book only two, but oh, what works of art and harsh beauty they are. A young boy and an elderly man - what greater contrast in life events, life skills, attitudes could there be. They have in common that they are both outsiders, running away from lives they have found intolerable.

Jaxie is a teenage boy, living with his abusive and neglectful father, his mother having died from cancer some years previous. He finds his father dead, and petrified he is going to be picked up for the death, he runs away: a born survivor, determined to make the long trek to a distance town where his aunt and cousin live.

After a few gruelling days in the hot WA sun, trying to fend for himself, he chances upon an old recluse, Fintan MacGillis, a defrocked priest banished to the salt flats outback. One of the mysteries of the story is that the reader never actually finds out what he did to be banished. Suffice to say, the obvious is what occurs to young Jaxie, making for a most uneasy alliance as the two forge a side-by-side life together. This can't last forever of course......

The voice of Jaxie is incredible.  Getting inside the head of a teenage boy is a challenge I don't even want to think about. The story is told entirely through Jaxie's eyes and voice, creating a character half man, half child - , tough, vulnerable, arrogant, frightened, strong, focussed, impatient, a vocab you would not want to share with your grandmother.  And his portrait of old man Fintan shows a tough, damaged but oh so wise old geezer of a man, totally self reliant apart from 6 monthly visits by unknown outsiders who replenish his meagre supplies.

I read 'Cloudstreet' a few years ago, and really did not like it. Then I read 'Dirt Music'' which I loved. This is along the same lines, simply amazing.