The best of Tim Winton Tim Winton's new novel, Eyrie, is out in October 2013. I don't get Tim Winton's love of fish. But there is something poetic about them in Winton's hands that grips me like no other. Like his God, Winton is also a fisher of men, the lost adolescent boy and men hollowed out by misfortune. Winton changes location from coast to city for his new novel Eyrie but Tom Keely is one of Winton's quintessential trapped men. Here's my selection of the best of Winton: The Life of Pi won the Man Booker prize the year Dirt Music made it to the shortlist. It must have been a close fought contest, as Dirt Music is Winton, the Christian mystic, singing himself to an epiphany. Luther Fox is the lone survivor of a car accident that kills his brother and his wife and their two children. Bereaved, Fox retreats from life until a chance meeting with love unleashes violence in the fishermen's community of White Point. Fox flees to an uninhabited gulf island where he dreams of the dead and sings back to life his bittersweet memories. God knows, Winton's music will undo you. Winton plunges into the dangerous currents of adolescent boys, their greed for risk, addiction to endorphins, emotional errancy and unexplained codes of conduct. From disillusioned middle age, Bruce reflects on the seminal year he and his 13-year-old mate meet Billy Sanderson, a once famous rider of Hawaiian breaks and now restless junkie in search of the next thrill ride. "Sando" dares his young disciples to ride Old Smoky, a growling course of 20 foot waves breaking between cliff and reef. Taste the tingly electric rush of feeling alive, taunts Sando. The rest of it's just sport'n recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day. As Bruce learns, risk-taking is a perverse way to live. This slim novella dedicated to Winton's three children reads as a parable of the sea, and the circle of life. Blueback is a groper, the most magnificent thing Abel Jackson has ever seen. It's gigantic, with fins like ping-pong paddles, a tail like a blue-green rudder and a shadow as big as a horse. Blueback is a constant in the life of Abel as the boy grows to become a teenager and leaves his fishing village for high school, university and marriage. And the fish is the focus of Abel's mother's lobbying for a marine sanctuary. In his few media interviews, Winton has downplayed this book's literary intentions, and Blueback stands as a simple celebration of the feral freedoms of Winton's childhood. Readers tend to fall into two camps: those who adore Winton's ode to a past age, and those who drown in the novel's overt nostalgia. The Miles Franklin judges were, however, clearly likeminded with The Washington Post when its critic drew similarities between Cloudstreet and James Joyce's Dubliners. Cloudstreet follows the lives of two families, the Pickles and the Lambs, who find themselves sharing the same scruffy house in Perth at the close of World War II. The Lambs are the positive to the Pickles' negative: beelike and unbuckling when the "only miracle that ever happened to them" turns their son into a drooling "slowbo." Whereas gloom follows the Pickles from the day Sam Pickles loses his four fingers mining guano. Winton piles on the laconic humour. A widow slumps in rigor mortis over her piano, her bony nose stopped on middle C. Sam's severed stumps are returned to him in a bottle labelled Sam's Pickles. Read Cloudstreet and see why it made Winton's literary reputation. This is the book that started it all. An Open Swimmer won the Australian Vogel National Literary Award and was his first book. Winton was 21. Jerra Nilsam is Winton's original lost boy, a university drop-out, searching for self among the shadows of family secrets. In Jerra's feckless pursuit of truth he runs into a deranged old man living alone on a wild stretch of coast. Jerra's frustrations find vent in a story told to him by his father, of pearls found in the heads of fish. The pearls amount to "the distilled knowledge of lifetimes, of ancestors, of travel, of instinct, of things unseen and unknown." Only when he eventually peels back fish scale does he realise the foolishness of his quest. Finally, one for the kids: The Bugalugs Bum Thief. Long before Andy Griffiths conceived his tales of runaway posteriors, Winton understood the snigger value of a bum joke. Skeeta Anderson wakes one morning to find himself unaccountably bumless and sets out to discover where his cheeks have gone. Poll: What is your favourite Tim Winton novel? Dirt Music Breath Blueback Cloudstreet An Open Swimmer The Riders That Eye, The Sky The Turning Shallows In the Winter Dark Total votes: 324.