Winton grew up on Australia's west coast, where he would fall asleep after days spent fishing, surfing, diving and swimming, with his back "a map of dried salt and crackling sunburn". He has been in love with the ocean ever since and writes about it with an almost religious reverence. Free diving as a teenager, he would "understand the Christian mystics for moments at a time", and hold his breath until "the final forgetfulness hovered at the edge of vision".

An encounter with an eight-metre long whale shark is told in the second person. "Spangled and speckled by the lights on the moving surface of the water, it makes you smile around your snorkel," he writes. The shark eyes the swimmer neutrally. "Then slowlyit tilts away into the deep, tail fin swinging off into the haze below."

Though a short book, Land's Edge will help fans of Winton's award-winning novels understand how the ocean dominates his imaginative world. It offers "a stepping-aside from terrestrial problems to be absorbed in the long moment", he says. As a child: "In sight of the sea I felt as though I had all my fingers and toes."