On childhood holidays to the western coast, Tim Winton's days followed a joyous rhythm. In the mornings, the sun and surf kept him outside, in the water. In the afternoons, as the horizon wobbled with mirages and the wind came in from the ocean, he was driven inside, to books. In the `simple, peculiar shack' that his family borrowed each year there was a small library: a room with four walls of books, a world unto itself.

In this beautifully delicate memoir, Winton writes about his obsession with what happens where the water meets the shore - about diving, dunes, beachcombing - and the sense of being on the precarious, wondrous edge of things that haunts his novels. It is a book about the ebb and flow that became a way of life, and that shaped one of our finest writers.

`Both a serial romantic and a truly gifted novelist' Mariella Frostrup, Mail on Sunday