Jaxie dreads going home. His mum’s dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he wishes he was an orphan. But no one’s ever told Jaxie Clackton to be careful what he wishes for.

In one terrible moment his life is stripped to little more than what he can carry and how he can keep himself alive. There’s just one person left in the world who can understand him and what he dares to hope for. But to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands on a trek that only a dreamer or a fugitive would attempt.

He traverses the vast, bare West Australian wheatbelt, heading towards the abandoned goldfields, staying out of sight long enough to reach the refuge of the salt country at the edge of the desert. But what he finds out there will challenge everything he’s ever thought about himself, about what’s right and wrong, about love and death and survival. And it will haunt him forever.

Tender and savage, The Shepherd’s Hut is an urgent masterpiece, a rifle-shot of a novel – crisp, fast, shocking - a stunning meditation on masculinity and power, violence and self-restraint, and on forgiveness and kindness as the ultimate acts of love, about solitude and unlikely friendship, about the raw business of survival, but most of all about what it takes to keep love and hope alive in a parched and brutal world.. The action turns on a knife edge of narrative tension as Tim Winton masterfully delivers a novel raw with emotion and an anti-hero who will break your heart.

Ben Ball, Publishing Director, Penguin Random House Australia says: ‘In The Shepherd’s Hut, Tim Winton gives voice to the coarse, destructive poetry of a youth struggling with something he can’t contain but can only begin to express. Both timeless and an acute reflection of our times, it’s a rifle-shot of a novel – crisp, fast, shocking – an urgent masterpiece.’