Eyrie

Eyrie is a novel by the Australian author Tim Winton, published in 2013. Its central character, Tom Keely, lives alone at the top of a highrise called the Mirador, in Fremantle, Western Australia. The building gives the book its title, and the view from the top of it is the one he has of the city.

Keely was once a high-powered environmental activist with real influence, and by the time the book opens he is divorced and destitute. The novel is about what remains of a person after the work that gave his life its shape has gone.

The question the book asks is how anybody can hope to do the right thing in a world that has been compromised in ways they cannot control, and it puts that question to a man who no longer has the power to act on an answer.

The story stays among the apartments and the people around Keely rather than in the world of politics he used to move in, and its interest is in the ordinary attachments that survive a fall from public life.