Ort knows the sky is watching. He knows what it means to watch; he spends long hours listening at doors and peering through cracks. Things are terribly wrong. His father is withering away, his sister is consumed by hatred, his grandmother is all inside herself, and his mother, a flower-child of the 1960s, is brave but helpless. Then a strange man appears at the door. That Eye, The Sky is about love, about a boy's vision of the world beyond, and about the blurry distinctions between the natural and supernatural. This is Winton at his most powerful.

Fred Scully leaves Australia to carve a new life for his family in Ireland. He and his wife, Jennifer, buy an old cottage in Ireland and Scully works to make it habitable whilst waiting for Jennifer and their daughter to join him. But at the airport, only his daughter steps off the plane.