Excerpt from Eyrie by Tim Winton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So screw it. Don’t touch that dial. Not the radio, nor the telly. Least of all the laptop. Leave it shut there on the table like a silt-sifting mussel beside the mobile. He was no longer relevant. And he didn’t give a shit about any of it now. He just couldn’t. Would not. Didn’t even read the papers anymore. Tried not to, at least. Had no need of more stories about ‘clean coal’. The national daily prosecuting its long war against climate science. Didn’t matter which rag you read, it would be another instalment about the triumph of capital. One more fawning profile of a self-made iron heiress and he’d mix himself a Harpic Wallbanger and be done with it. Just to get the fucking taste out of his mouth. You didn’t even need to look. You knew what to expect. The summer ration of shark stories and prissy scandals about the same coked-up footballer between episodes of soul-searching about shopping hours. Made your kidneys boil for shame.

Nah, the news only upheld what you understood already. What you feared and hated. How things were and would be. It was no help. Neither was the plonk, of course – only fair to concede that. Like the news, drinking offered more confirmation than consolation. And it was so much easier to fill a void than to contemplate it.

Still gnashing at that meatless bone. Let it go. Concentrate on choking down the morning’s free-range analgesics. And stay vertical. Think up.

Well, the upside was he hadn’t died in the night. He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed. And he was in urgent need of a healing breakfast. Soon as all his bits booted up. Just give it a mo.

At the sliding door to the balcony he looked down beyond the forecourt across the flaring iron rooftops to the harbour. Cranes, containers on the quay in savage yellows, reds, blues; the hectic green superstructure of a tanker’s bridge. Searing flash of sun on canted glass. Everything vivid enough to bring on an ambush.

The sea beyond the breakwater was flat, the islands suspended in brothy haze. An orange pilot boat surged past the moles and out into open water, twin plumes of diesel smoke flagging from its stacks, the wake like a whitening wound on the skin of the sea. Which seemed all very lyrical and seafaring until you cracked the door a little and felt the red-plain wind. More hellish updraught than pastoral uplift. Harsh, pitiless. Laden with grit sharp enough to flay a baby-boomer to the bone.

Retreat. Snap the slider back in its slot. And stand there like a mouth-breathing moron. In your rancid towel.

Still. The real estate agent was right: it was a hell of a view for the money. That was the upside. Not just surviving the night but waking to this, an unparalleled prospect of the great Indian Ocean. The champagne outlook for a homebrew outlay. The Mirador wasn’t just the tallest building in town, it was the ugliest by quite a margin. You had to smile at the lovely deluded aspirational romance of the name. When local worthies could have just settled for Aqua Vista or Island Vue they plumped for Mirador: bolthole for the quaking matador, the sex-free paramour, sad, sorry and head-sore. Where you had, despite your fears, the unsought luxury of looking out from on high. Out and down. Like a prince. From your seedy little eyrie. On all the strange doings and stranger beings below. All those folks, booted and suited, still in the game. Trying to give a shit. While keeping the wolf from the door. As if that were even possible.

Keely rested his brow against the warm glass of the door. A ship’s horn set the pane thrumming against his skull. The first blast sent a zizz through his brainpan, down his jaw to the base of his neck. The second was longer and stronger, rooting so deeply into him he recoiled and backpedalled with a grunt.

And that was when he registered the strange sensation underfoot. The carpet. It was wet. And not just wet, it was sodden.

Excerpted from Eyrie by Tim Winton. Copyright © 2014 by Tim Winton. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.