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“The Shepherd’s Hut” is no different. A fable about acceptance and forgiveness, teenager Jaxie Clackton is a victim of domestic violence. Orphaned when his father dies, and afraid he’ll be blamed, he flees on foot from his small town to the northern wheat belt. In a desperate quest that mirrors both “Huckleberry Finn” and the knights from the tales of King Arthur, he must overcome physical deprivation to reach the girl he loves. Along the way, he finds a different intimacy: friendship with exiled Irish priest Fintan MacGillis who lives in a shepherd’s hut with only the kangaroos for company.

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Most of Mr. Winton’s books have been set along the wild coastline, which he calls home, or the suburbs of waterside Perth, where he grew up. “The Shepherd’s Hut” takes place far from the ocean, in Western Australia’s vast interior saltlands where “the dirt was baked hard” and the earth is all “salt bush and low mulga, red dirt and pebbles.”

Jaxie Clackton, too, is a boy hardened: a kid with an “elbows-out walk like a scorpion all burred up for a fight.” Mr. Winton initially tried writing “The Shepherd’s Hut” from multiple perspectives, predicting scant sympathy for the “foul-mouthed hypermasculine” Jaxie. Looking back, he sees this aborted dilution of Jaxie’s voice, which now dominates the novel, as “a failure of nerve,” he said. Writers need “to take risks and to do stuff that is awkward.”

Over a meal of fish and wine, Mr. Winton is soft and modest, if shy. He clasps his hands as he talks, peppers his conversation with “mate,” and rarely makes eye contact. With his long hair cascading down his shoulders he comes across as a faintly disheveled surfer dude for whom, refreshingly, airs and graces don’t matter. (When I ask what he is wearing to the movie premiere, he gives a bemused shrug, points to his blue T-shirt and replies, “this?”)

Raised in a working-class evangelical Christian family, Mr. Winton was the first of his close kin to ever finish high school (some of his relatives remain functionally illiterate). Reading became a form of “transport, in almost that religious sense,” he said.