Tim Winton Books in Order

A young man named Jerra heads to a remote stretch of Western Australian coast with his mate Sean, where an unsettling encounter with an old loner forces him to face buried anger, family history and the painful drift into adulthood.

Set in the whaling town of Angelus in the late 1970s, Shallows follows a young couple whose relationship is tested as anti-whaling activists descend on the community, forcing everyone to choose between tradition, livelihood and a new environmental conscience.

Scission gathers spare, unsettling stories about people whose lives are splitting apart – marriages under strain, neighbours at odds, children watching adults fail – capturing the moment when an ordinary existence shears off in a new, often painful direction.

This collection of stories, many featuring Jerra and Rachel Nilsam, traces couples and families in working-class Perth as they wrestle with illness, jealousy, violence and love, asking what it takes for two people to keep going together.

After his father is crippled in a car crash, twelve-year-old Ort Flack watches his already fragile family unravel in a dusty Australian town, then shift again when a mysterious drifter moves in, bringing talk of God, hope and miracles.

In an isolated valley known as the Sink, four damaged neighbours are unnerved by something unseen that maims livestock in the night, drawing them into a tense reckoning with guilt, fear and the secrets they’ve each tried to bury.

Thirteen-year-old Lockie Leonard is the new kid in a small coastal town, a keen surfer saddled with an embarrassing family and a hopeless crush on glamorous Vicki Streeton. His first year of high school becomes a crash course in love, friendship and humiliation.

Jesse slips on his gumboots at dawn and wanders beyond the garden gate into paddocks, creeks and bush, discovering that the world beyond home can be both thrilling and frightening before kind creatures help him find his way back.

Two hard-up families, the Lambs and the Pickles, share a rambling house beside the river in mid-century Perth, building a noisy, stubborn community across twenty years of accidents, love affairs, tragedies and small joys in one of Winton’s defining novels.

In the town of Bugalugs, everyone wakes to find their bottoms missing, and it’s up to Skeeta Anderson to track down the culprit. This fast, silly mystery turns a truly ridiculous premise into a gleeful read-aloud for kids.

Blood and Water brings together stories from Winton’s earlier collections and new pieces, focusing on young couples, parents and drifters in contemporary Australia whose ordinary lives are jolted by betrayal, illness or desire, yet marked by moments of stubborn tenderness.

Part memoir, part love letter to the coast, Land’s Edge pairs Winton’s lyrical reflections on childhood holidays, surfing and beachcombing with photographs of Western Australia, tracing how life lived on the shoreline has shaped his imagination and his writing.

Still nursing a broken heart, Lockie Leonard finds an unlikely best mate in metal-loving Egg and a new crush in a fearless young surfer, then throws himself into a campaign to clean up the filthy bay that sustains their town.

When Fred Scully waits at an Irish airport for his wife and daughter, only his terrified seven-year-old arrives. With no explanation and very little money, he drags the child across Europe searching for answers, testing the limits of love and sanity.

Abel Jackson grows up diving in a pristine bay and befriends a giant blue groper he calls Blueback. As developers and commercial fishers close in on the reef, Abel and his mother fight to protect the place and creature they love.

Having survived his first year of high school, Lockie Leonard thinks life might finally calm down, but his family starts acting stranger than ever and his friendships shift beneath him, forcing Lockie to rethink what kind of ‘legend’ he wants to be.

Australian Colors is a panoramic journey through outback and small-town Australia, pairing Bill Bachman’s vivid photographs with Winton’s reflections on country, people and weather, and capturing both the harshness and strange beauty of the continent’s interior.

Alice lives by the sea but is terrified of swimming where her feet can’t touch the bottom. With patience, play and the sudden appearance of dolphins, her family helps her edge past fear and discover the quiet magic of the deep water.

Down to Earth combines striking aerial photographs of Australian landscapes with Winton’s meditative essay on how landforms, colours and distance shape the way Australians see themselves, inviting readers to look again at deserts, coasts and farms from above.

In a remote West Australian fishing town, restless Georgie Jutland falls for Luther Fox, a damaged loner who poaches fish at night. Their affair shatters her life with powerful fisherman Jim Buckridge and drives Luther on a dangerous trek into the far north.

These seventeen interconnected stories circle the coastal town of Angelus, following characters at different ages as they hit turning points in love, family and faith. Read together, they form a rough, moving mosaic of small-town Australian life over decades.

Middle-aged paramedic Bruce ‘Pikelet’ Pike looks back on his teenage years in a logging town, when he and his reckless friend Loonie chased huge waves under the spell of older surfer Sando and his wife Eva, discovering both exhilaration and dangerous obsession.

Smalltown pairs Martin Mischkulnig’s large-format photographs with Winton’s essay to portray neglected Australian country towns – peeling shopfronts, empty streets, lone service stations – and to ask what happens to people and community when places are left to slowly decay.

In this play three middle-aged misfits live aboard neighbouring boats in a Fremantle marina, hiding from their pasts. On Australia Day a drunk English backpacker stumbles into their lives, and a night of booze and loose talk dredges up buried guilt and compromise.

Once a celebrated environmental campaigner, Tom Keely now lives broke and numbed by pills in a high-rise flat overlooking Fremantle. When he reconnects with Gemma, a woman from his past, and her grandson Kai, their precarious lives tangle in ways that demand courage he’s not sure he has.

Hatched is an anthology celebrating twenty years of the Tim Winton Award for Young Writers, collecting prize-winning short stories by children and teenagers from across Perth, framed by Winton’s introduction about why small, early successes can matter so much.

Set on a drought-stricken farm, this play finds Georgie Jutland from Dirt Music alone at night when an Aboriginal brother and sister turn up on the highway needing help, sparking an uneasy, tender encounter about grief, trust and staying put.

Shrine follows Adam and Mary Mansfield, parents struggling to cope after their son Jack dies in a car crash on the south-west coast of Western Australia. When a young woman who knew Jack appears, Adam is forced to revisit his son’s final hours and his own buried grief.

In Island Home Winton blends memoir and nature writing to trace how beaches, reefs, deserts and suburbs across Australia have shaped his imagination, arguing that paying attention to landscape is part of learning how to live responsibly on the continent.

This collection of autobiographical essays ranges from near-miss accidents and childhood fears to class, religion, environmental politics and the craft of writing, offering a candid look at the experiences and obsessions that lie behind Winton’s fiction.

After years of abuse, teenage Jaxie Clackton flees his small town when his father dies in a suspicious accident, trekking alone into the saltlands of Western Australia. There he finds a reclusive priest whose own secrets make their fragile alliance both risky and life-saving.

Small Mercies follows Fremantle widower Peter Dyson, whose wife has died by suicide, as he tries to raise their young son and outrun his grief by returning to his coastal hometown. Confronting an old, destructive love forces him to look for the tiny mercies that make survival possible.