"Dear Reader Once in a publishing blue moon a novel comes along which stakes out out a very special space for itself. It's usually non-conformist and brave. It breaks the usual templates and creates new rules. And it's usually a major bestseller. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Everything is Illuminated and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius all take a place on this short but powerful list.
Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton's debut novel, falls into this hallowed canon. it's moving, brilliant, quirky, funny, haunting and opens up new horizons..."
Yeah WOW is right
Enjoy!
ISBN-13: 9780062898104
Publisher: Harper
Release Date: 4-2-2019
Length: 464
Source: Publisher - Review to come
Buy It: Amazon/ B&N/Kobo/IndieBound/Audible
Publisher: Harper
Release Date: 4-2-2019
Length: 464
Source: Publisher - Review to come
Buy It: Amazon/ B&N/Kobo/IndieBound/Audible
Overview:
An utterly wonderful debut novel of love, crime, magic, fate and a boy’s coming of age, set in 1980s Australia and infused with the originality, charm, pathos, and heart of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The mind can take you anywhere you want to go
Eli Bell’s life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail, and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli’s life is Slim—a notorious felon and national record-holder for successful prison escapes—who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother.The mind can take you anywhere you want to go
Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, a seedy suburb populated by Polish and Vietnamese refugees, this twelve-year-old boy with an old soul and an adult mind is just trying to follow his heart, learn what it takes to be a good man, and train for a glamorous career in journalism. Life, however, insists on throwing obstacles in Eli’s path—most notably Tytus Broz, Brisbane’s legendary drug dealer.
But the real trouble lies ahead. Eli is about to fall in love, face off against truly bad guys, and fight to save his mother from a certain doom—all before starting high school.
A story of brotherhood, true love, family, and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe is the tale of an adolescent boy on the cusp of discovering the man he will be. Powerful and kinetic, Trent Dalton’s debut is sure to be one of the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novels you will experience.
Read an excerpt:
Boy
Writes Words
Your end is a dead blue wren.
‘Did you see that, Slim?’
‘See what?’
‘Nothing.’
Your end is a dead blue wren. No doubt about it.
Your. End. No doubt about it. Is. A. Dead. Blue. Wren.
* * *
The crack in Slim’s windscreen looks like a tall and armless stickman
bowing to royalty. The crack in Slim’s windscreen looks like Slim. His
windscreen wipers have smeared a rainbow of old dirt over to my passenger side.
Slim says a good way for me to remember the small details of my life is to
associate moments and visions with things on my person or things in my reg
ular waking life that I see and smell and touch
often. Body things, bedroom things, kitchen things. This way I will have two
reminders of any given detail for the price of one.
That’s how Slim beat Black
Peter. That’s how Slim survived the hole. Everything had two meanings, one
for here, here being where he was then, cell D9, 2 Division, Boggo
Road Gaol, and another for there, that boundless and unlocked
universe expanding in his head and his heart. Nothing in the here but
four green concrete walls and darkness upon darkness and his lone and
stationary body. An angle iron and steel mesh bed welded to a wall. A
toothbrush and a pair of cloth prison slippers. But a cup of old milk slid
through a cell door slot by a silent screw took him there, to Ferny
Grove in the 1930s, the lanky young farmhand milking cows on the outskirts of
Brisbane. A forearm scar became a portal to a boyhood bike ride. A shoulder
sunspot was a wormhole to the beaches of the Sunshine Coast. One rub and he was
gone. An escaped prisoner here in D9. Pretend free but never on the run, which
was as good as how he’d been before they threw him in the hole, real free but
always on the run.
He’d thumb the peaks and valleys of his knuckles and they would
take him there, to the hills of the Gold Coast hinterland, take him
all the way to Springbrook Falls, and the cold steel prison bed frame of cell
D9 would become a water-worn lime
stone rock, and the prison
hole’s cold concrete floor beneath his bare feet summer-warm water to dip his
toes into, and he would touch his cracked lips and remember how it felt when
something as soft and as perfect as Irene’s lips reached his, how she took all
his sins and all his pain away with her quenching kiss, washed him clean like
Springbrook Falls washed him clean with all that white water bucketing on his
head.
I’m more than a little
concerned that Slim’s prison fantasies are becoming mine. Irene resting on that
wet and mossy emerald boulder, naked and blonde, giggling like Marilyn Monroe,
head back and loose and powerful, master of any man’s universe, keeper of
dreams, a vision there to stick around for here, to let the anytime blade of a
smuggled shiv wait another day.
‘I had an adult mind,’ Slim always says. That’s how he beat Black
Peter, Boggo Road’s underground isolation cell. They threw him in that medieval
box for fourteen days during a Queensland summer heatwave. They gave him half a
loaf of bread to eat across two weeks. They gave him four, maybe five cups of
water.
Slim says half of his Boggo Road prison mates would have died
after a week in Black Peter because half of any prison population, and any
major city of the world for that matter, is filled
with adult men with child
minds. But an adult mind can take an adult man anywhere he wants to go.
Black Peter had a scratchy
coconut fibre mat that he slept on, the size of a doormat, or the length of one
of Slim’s long shinbones. Every day, Slim says, he lay on his side on the coir
mat and pulled those long shinbones into his chest and closed his eyes and
opened the door to Irene’s bedroom and he slipped under Irene’s white bedsheet
and he spooned his body gently against hers and he wrapped his right arm around
Irene’s naked porcelain belly and there he stayed for fourteen days. ‘Curled up
like a bear and hibernated,’ he says. ‘Got so cosy down there in hell I never
wanted to climb back up.’
Slim says I have an adult mind in a child’s body. I’m only twelve
years old but Slim reckons I can take the hard stories. Slim reckons I should
hear all the prison stories of male rape and men who broke their necks on
knotted bedsheets and swallowed sharp pieces of metal designed to tear through
their insides and guarantee themselves a week-long vacation in the sunny Royal
Brisbane Hospital. I think he goes too far sometimes with the details, blood
spitting from raped arseholes and the like. ‘Light and shade, kid,’ Slim says.
‘No escaping the light and no escaping the shade.’ I need to hear the stories
about disease and death inside so I can understand the impact of those memories
of Irene.
Slim says I can take the
hard stories because the age of my body matters nothing compared to the age of
my soul, which he has gradually narrowed down to somewhere between the early
seventies and dementia. Some months ago, sitting in this very car, Slim said he
would gladly share a prison cell with me because I listen and I remember what I
listen to. A single tear rolled down my face when he paid me this great
roommate honour.
‘Tears don’t go so well
inside,’ he said.
I didn’t know if he meant inside a prison cell or inside one’s
body. Half out of pride I cried, half out of shame, because I’m not worthy, if
worthy’s a word for a bloke to share a lag with.
‘Sorry,’ I said, apologising for the tear. He shrugged.
‘There’s more where that came from,’ he said.
Your end is a dead blue wren. Your end is a dead blue wren.
* * *
I will remember the rainbow
of old dirt wiped across Slim’s windscreen through the shape of the milky moon
rising into my left thumbnail, and forever more when I look into that milky
moon I will remember the day Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday, the greatest prison
escapee who ever lived, the wondrous and elusive ‘Houdini of Boggo Road’,
taught me – Eli Bell, the boy with the
old soul and the adult mind, prime prison cellmate candidate, the boy
with his tears on the outside – to drive his rusted dark blue Toyota
LandCruiser.
Thirty-two years ago, in February 1953, after a
six-day trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court, a man named Judge Edwin James
Droughton Stanley sentenced Slim to life for brutally bashing a taxi driver
named Athol McCowan to death with a .45 Colt pistol. The papers have always
called Slim ‘the Taxi Driver Killer’.
I just call him my babysitter.
‘Clutch,’ he says.
Slim’s left thigh tenses as his old sun-brown leg,
wrinkled with seven hundred and fifty life lines because he might be seven
hundred and fifty years old, pushes the clutch in. Slim’s old sun-brown left
hand shifts the gear stick. A hand-rolled cigarette burning to yellow, grey and
then black, hanging precariously to the spit on the corner of his bottom lip.
‘Noootral.’
I can see my brother, August, through the crack in
the windscreen. He sits on our brown brick fence writing his life story in
fluid cursive with his right forefinger, etching words into thin air.
Boy writes on air.
Boy writes on air the way
my old neighbour Gene Crimmins says Mozart played piano, like every word was
meant to arrive, parcel packed and shipped from a place beyond his own busy
mind. Not on paper and writing pad or typewriter, but thin air, the invisible
stuff, that great act-of-faith stuff that you might not even know existed did
it not sometimes bend into wind and blow against your face. Notes, reflections,
diary entries, all written on thin air, with his extended right forefinger
swishing and slashing, writing letters and sentences into nothingness, as
though he has to get it all out of his head but he needs the story to vanish
into space as well, forever dipping his finger into his eternal glass well of
invisible ink. Words don’t go so well inside. Always better out than in.
He grips Princess Leia in
his left hand. Boy never lets her go. Six weeks ago Slim took August and me to
see all three Star Wars movies at the Yatala drive-in. We
drank in that faraway galaxy from the back of this LandCruiser, our heads
resting on inflated cask wine bags that were themselves resting on an old
dead-mullet-smelling crab pot that Slim kept in the back near a tackle box and
an old kerosene lamp. There were that many stars out that night over south-east
Queensland that when the Millennium Falcon flew towards the side of the picture
screen I thought
for a moment it might just
fly on into our own stars, take the light-speed express flight right on down to
Sydney.
‘You listenin’?’ barks
Slim.
‘Yeah.’
No. Never really listenin’ like I should. Always thinkin’ too much
about August. About Mum. About Lyle. About Slim’s Buddy Holly spectacles. About
the deep wrinkles in Slim’s forehead. About the way he walks funny, ever since
he shot himself in the leg in 1952. About the fact he’s got a lucky freckle
like me. About how he believed me when I told him my lucky freckle had a
power to it, that it meant something to me, that when I’m nervous or scared or
lost, my first instinct is to look at that deep brown freckle on the middle
knuckle of my right forefinger. Then I feel better. Sounds dumb, Slim, I said.
Sounds crazy, Slim, I said. But he showed me his own lucky freckle, almost a
mole really, square on the knobby hill of his right wrist bone. He said he
thought it might be cancerous but it’s his lucky freckle and he couldn’t bring
himself to cut it out. In D9, he said, that freckle became sacred because it
reminded him of a freckle that Irene had high up on her inner left thigh, not
far at all from her holiest of holies, and he assured me that one day I too
would come to know this rare place on a woman’s high inner thigh and
I too would know just how Marco Polo felt when he
first ran his fingers over silk.
I liked that story, so I told Slim how seeing that
freckle on my right forefinger knuckle for the first time at around the age of
four, sitting in a yellow shirt with brown sleeves on a long brown vinyl
lounge, is as far back as my memory goes. There’s a television on in that
memory. I look down at my forefinger and I see the freckle and then I look up
and turn my head right and I see a face I think belongs to Lyle but it might
belong to my father, though I don’t really remember my father’s face.
So the freckle is always consciousness. My personal
big bang. The lounge. The yellow and brown shirt. And I arrive. I am here. I
told Slim I thought the rest was questionable, that the four years before that
moment might as well never have happened. Slim smiled when I told him that. He
said that freckle on my right forefinger knuckle is home.
* * *
Ignition.
‘For fuck’s sake, Socrates, what did I just say?’
Slim barks.
‘Be careful to put your foot down?’
‘You were just staring
right at me. You looked like you were listenin’ but you weren’t fuckin’
listenin’. Your eyes were wanderin’ all over my face, lookin’ at this, lookin’
at that, but you didn’t hear a word.’
That’s August’s fault. Boy
don’t talk. Chatty as a thimble, chinwaggy as a cello. He can talk, but he
doesn’t want to talk. Not a single word that I can recall. Not to me, not to
Mum, not to Lyle, not even to Slim. He communicates fine enough, conveys great
passages of conversation in a gentle touch of your arm, a laugh, a shake of his
head. He can tell you how he’s feeling by the way he unscrews a Vegemite jar lid.
He can tell you how happy he is by the way he butters bread, how sad he is by
the way he ties his shoelaces.
Some days I sit across from him on the lounge and we’re
playing Super Breakout on the Atari and having so much fun
that I look across at him at the precise moment I swear he’s going to say
something. ‘Say it,’ I say. ‘I know you want to. Just say it.’ He smiles, tilts
his head to the left and raises his left eyebrow, and his right hand makes an
arcing motion, like he’s rubbing an invisible snow dome, and that’s how he
tells me he’s sorry. One day, Eli, you will know why I am not speaking.
This is not that day, Eli. Now have your fucking go.
Mum says August stopped
talking around the time she ran away from my dad. August was six years old. She
says the universe stole her boy’s words when she wasn’t looking, when she was
too caught up in the stuff she’s going to tell me when I’m older, the stuff
about how the universe stole her boy and replaced him with the enigmatic
A-grade alien loop I’ve had to share a double bunk bed with for the past eight
years.
Every now and then some
unfortunate kid in August’s class makes fun of August and his refusal to speak.
His reaction is always the same: he walks up to that month’s particularly
foul-mouthed school bully who is dangerously unaware of August’s hidden streak
of psychopathic rage and, blessed by his established inability to explain
his actions, he simply attacks the boy’s unblemished jaw, nose and ribs with
one of three sixteen-punch boxing combinations my mum’s long-time boyfriend,
Lyle, has tirelessly taught us both across endless winter weekends with an old
brown leather punching bag in the backyard shed. Lyle doesn’t believe in much,
but he believes in the circumstance-shifting power of a broken nose.
The teachers generally take August’s side because he’s a
straight-A student, as dedicated as they come. When the child psychologists
come knocking, Mum rustles up another glowing testimony from another school
teacher about why August’s a
dream addition to any class
and why the Queensland education system would benefit from more children just
like him, completely fucking mute.
Mum says when he was five
or six August stared for hours into reflective surfaces. While I was banging
toy trucks and play blocks on the kitchen floor as Mum made carrot cake, he was
staring into an old circular make-up mirror of Mum’s. He would sit for hours
around puddles looking down at his reflection, not in a Narcissus kind of way,
but in what Mum thought was an exploratory fashion, like he was actually
searching for something. I would pass by our bedroom doorway and catch him
making faces in the mirror we had on top of an old wood veneer chest of
drawers. ‘Found it yet?’ I asked once when I was nine. He turned from the
mirror with a blank face and a kink in the upper left corner of his top lip
that told me there was a world out there beyond our cream-coloured bedroom
walls that I was neither ready for nor needed in. But I kept asking him that
question whenever I saw him staring at himself. ‘Found it yet?’
He always stared at the moon, tracked its path over our house from
our bedroom window. He knew the angles of moonlight. Sometimes, deep into the
night, he’d slip out our window, unfurl the hose and drag it in his pyjamas all
the way out to the front gutter where he’d sit for hours, silently filling the
street with wa
ter. When he got the angles
just right, a giant puddle would fill with the silver reflection of a full
moon. ‘The moon pool,’ I proclaimed grandly one cold night. And August beamed,
wrapped his right arm over my shoulders and nodded his head, the way Mozart
might have nodded his head at the end of Gene Crimmins’s favourite opera, Don
Giovanni. He knelt down and with his right forefinger he wrote three words
in perfect cursive across the moon pool.
Boy swallows universe,
he wrote.
It was August who taught me about details, how to read a face, how
to extract as much information as possible from the non-verbal, how to mine
expression and conversation and story from the data of every last speechless
thing that is right before your eyes, the things that are talking to you
without talking to you. It was August who taught me I didn’t always have to
listen. I might just have to look.
* * *
The LandCruiser rattles to
chunky metal life and I bounce on the vinyl seat. Two pieces of Juicy Fruit
that I’ve carried for seven hours slip from my shorts pocket into a foam cavity
in the seat that Slim’s old and loyal and dead white mutt, Pat, regularly
chewed on during the frequent trips the two made
from Brisbane to the town of Jimna, north of Kilcoy, in Slim’s post-prison
years.
Pat’s full name was Patch
but that became a mouthful for Slim. He and the dog would regularly sift for
gold in a secret Jimna backwoods creek bed that Slim believes, to this day,
contains enough gold deposits to make King Solomon raise an eyebrow. He still
goes out there with his old pan, the first Sunday of every month. But the
search for gold ain’t the same without Pat, he says. It was Pat who could
really go for gold. The dog had the nose for it. Slim reckons Pat had a genuine
lust for gold, the world’s first canine to suffer a case of gold fever. ‘The
glittery sickness,’ he says. ‘Sent ol’ Pat round the bend.’
Slim shifts the gear stick.
‘Be careful to push the clutch down. First. Release the
clutch.’
Gentle push on the accelerator.
‘And steadily on the pedally.’
The hulking LandCruiser moves forward three metres along our
grassy kerbside and Slim brakes, the car parallel to August still writing
furiously into thin air with his right forefinger. Slim and I turn our heads
hard left to watch August’s apparent burst of creativity. When he finishes
writing a full sentence he dabs the
air as though he’s marking
a full stop. He wears his favourite green T-shirt with the words You
Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet written across it in rainbow lettering. Floppy
brown hair, borderline Beatle cut. He wears a pair of Lyle’s old blue and
yellow Parramatta Eels supporter shorts despite the fact that, at thirteen
years of age, at least five of which he has spent watching Parramatta Eels
games on the couch with Lyle and me, he doesn’t have the slightest interest in
rugby league. Our dear mystery boy. Our Mozart. August is one year older than
me but August is one year older than everybody. August is one year older than
the universe.
When he finishes writing
five full sentences he licks the tip of his forefinger like he’s inking a
quill, then he plugs back into whatever mystical source is pushing the invisible
pen that scribbles his invisible writing. Slim rests his arms on the steering
wheel, takes a long drag of his rollie, not taking his eyes off August.
‘What’s he writin’ now?’ Slim asks.
August’s oblivious to our stares, his eyes only following the letters
in his personal blue sky. Maybe to him it’s an endless ream of lined paper that
he writes on in his head, or maybe he sees the black writing lines stretched
across the sky. It’s mirror writing to me. I can read it if I’m facing him at
the right angle, if
I can see the letters clear
enough to turn them round in my head, spin them round in my mirror mind.
‘Same sentence over and
over this time.’
‘What’s he sayin’?’
The sun over August’s shoulder. White hot god of a thing. A hand
to my forehead. No doubt about it.
‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
August freezes. He stares at me. He looks like me, but a better
version of me, stronger, more beautiful, everything smooth on his face, smooth
like the face he sees when he stares into the moon pool.
Say it again. ‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
August gives a half-smile, shakes his head, looks at me like I’m
the one who’s crazy. Like I’m the one who’s imagining things. You’re
always imagining things, Eli.
‘Yeah, I saw you. I’ve been watching you for the past five minutes.’
He smiles wide, furiously wiping his words from the sky with an
open palm. Slim smiles wide too, shakes his head.
‘That boy’s got the answers,’ Slim says.
‘To what?’ I wonder.
‘To the questions,’ Slim says.
He reverses the
LandCruiser, takes her back three metres, brakes.
‘Your turn now.’
Slim coughs, chokes up brown tobacco spit that he missiles out the
driver’s window to our sun-baked and potholed street running past fourteen
low-set sprawling houses, ours and everybody else’s in shades of cream,
aquamarine and sky blue. Sandakan Street, Darra, my little suburb of Polish and
Vietnamese refugees and Bad Old Days refugees like Mum and August and me,
exiled here for the past eight years, hiding out far from the rest of the
world, marooned survivors of the great ship hauling Australia’s lower-class
shitheap, separated from America and Europe and Jane Seymour by oceans and a
darn pretty Great Barrier Reef and another 7000 kilometres of Queensland
coastline and then an overpass taking cars to Brisbane city, and separated a
bit more still by the nearby Queensland Cement and Lime Company factory
that blows cement powder across Darra on windy days and covers our rambling
home’s sky-blue plasterboard walls with dust that August and I have to hose off
before the rain comes and sets the dust to cement, leaving hard grey veins of
misery across the house front and the large window that Lyle throws his
cigarette butts out of and I throw my apple cores
out of, always following
Lyle’s lead because, and maybe I’m too young to know better, Lyle’s always got
a lead worth following.
Darra is a dream, a stench,
a spilt garbage bin, a cracked mirror, a paradise, a bowl of Vietnamese noodle
soup filled with prawns, domes of plastic crab meat, pig ears and pig knuckles
and pig belly. Darra is a girl washed down a drainpipe, a boy with snot
slipping from his nose so ripe it glows on Easter night, a teenage girl
stretched across a train track waiting for the express to Central and beyond, a
South African man smoking Sudanese weed, a Filipino man injecting Afghani dope
next door to a girl from Cambodia sipping milk from Queensland’s Darling Downs.
Darra is my quiet sigh, my reflection on war, my dumb pre-teen longing, my
home.
‘When do you reckon they’ll be back?’ I ask.
‘Soon enough.’
‘What’d they go see?’
Slim wears a thin bronze-coloured button-up cotton shirt tucked
into dark blue shorts. He wears these shorts constantly and he says he rotates
between three pairs of the same shorts but every day I see the same hole in the
bottom right-hand corner of his rear pocket. His blue rubber thongs are
normally moulded to his old and callused feet, dirt-caked and sweat-stunk, but
his left thong slips off now, caught on the clutch, as he slides awkwardly
out of the car. Houdini’s
getting on. Houdini’s caught in the water chamber of Brisbane’s outer western
suburbs. Even Houdini can’t escape time. Slim can’t run from MTV. Slim can’t
run from Michael Jackson. Slim can’t escape the 1980s.
‘Terms of Endearment,’
he says, opening the passenger door.
I truly love Slim because he truly loves August and me. Slim was
hard and cold in his youth. He’s softened with age. Slim always cares for
August and me and how we’re going and how we’re going to grow up. I love him so
much for trying to convince us that when Mum and Lyle are out for so long like
this they are at the movies and not, in fact, dealing heroin purchased from
Vietnamese restaurateurs.
‘Lyle choose that one?’
I have suspected Mum and Lyle are drug dealers since I found a
five-hundred-gram brick of Golden Triangle heroin stowed in the mower catcher
in our backyard shed five days ago. I feel certain Mum and Lyle are drug
dealers when Slim tells me they have gone to the movies to see Terms of
Endearment.
Slim gives me a sharp look. ‘Slide over, smartarse,’ he mumbles
from the corner of his mouth.
Clutch in. First. Steadily on the pedally. The car jolts forward
and we’re moving. ‘Give it some gas,’ Slim says. My bare right
foot goes down, leg fully extended, and we cross
our lawn all the way to Mrs Dudzinski’s rosebush on the kerbside next door.
‘Get onto the road,’ Slim says, laughing.
Hard right on the wheel, off the gutter onto the
Sandakan Street asphalt.
‘Clutch in, second,’ Slim barks.
Quicker now. Past Freddy Pollard’s place, past
Freddy Pollard’s sister, Evie, pushing a headless Barbie down the street in a
toy pram.
‘Should I stop?’ I ask.
Slim looks in the rearview mirror, darts his head
to the passenger side mirror. ‘Nah, fuck it. Once round the block.’
Slip into third and we’re rumbling at forty
kilometres an hour. And we’re free. It’s a breakout. Me and Houdini. On the
run. Two great escapologists on the lam.
‘I’m driiiiving,’ I scream.
Slim laughs and his old chest wheezes.
Left into Swanavelder Street, on past the old World
War II Polish migrant centre where Lyle’s mum and dad spent their first days in
Australia. Left into Butcher Street where the Freemans keep their collection of
exotic birds: a squawking peacock, a greylag goose, a Muscovy duck. Fly on
free, bird. Drive. Drive. Left into Hardy, left back into Sandakan.
‘Slow her down,’ says Slim.
I slam the brakes and lose footing on the clutch
and the car cuts out, once again parallel to August, who is still writing words
on thin air, lost in the work.
‘Did ya see me, Gus?’ I holler. ‘Did ya see me
driving, Gus?’
He doesn’t look away from his words. Boy didn’t
even see us drive away.
‘What’s he scribblin’ now?’ Slim asks.
The same two words over and over again. The crescent
moon of a capital ‘C’. Chubby little ‘a’. Skinny little ‘i’, one descending
stroke in the air with a cherry on top. August sits in the same spot on the
fence that he usually sits on, by the missing brick, the space two bricks along
the fence from the red wrought-iron letterbox.
August is the missing brick. The moon pool is my
brother. August is the moon pool.
‘Two words,’ I say. ‘A name starting with “C”.’
I will associate her name with the day I learned to
drive and, forever more, the missing brick and the moon pool and Slim’s Toyota
LandCruiser and the crack in Slim’s windscreen and my lucky freckle, and
everything about my brother, August, will remind me of her.
‘What name?’ Slim asks.
‘Caitlyn.’
Caitlyn. There’s no doubt
about it. Caitlyn. That right forefinger and an endless blue sky sheet of paper
with that name on it.
‘You know anyone named Caitlyn?’ asks Slim.
‘No.’
‘What’s the second word?’
I follow August’s finger, swirling through the sky.
‘It’s “spies”,’ I say.
‘Caitlyn spies,’ Slim says. ‘Caitlyn spies.’ He drags on his
cigarette, contemplatively. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’
Caitlyn spies. No doubt about it.
Your end is a dead blue wren. Boy swallows universe. Caitlyn
spies.
No doubt about it.
These are the answers.
The answers to the questions.
Praise:
“Dalton’s splashy, stellar debut makes the typical coming-of-age novel look bland by comparison…In less adept hands, these antics might descend into whimsy, but Dalton’s broadly observant eye, ability to temper pathos with humor, and thorough understanding of the mechanics of plot prevent the novel from breaking into sparkling pieces…This is an outstanding debut.”- Publishers Weekly (starred review)A “marvelously plot-rich novel, which…is filled with beautifully lyric prose….Exceptional.”- Booklist (starred review)
“Joyous. Simply joyous. I hugged myself as I read it. My heart raced, swelled, burst; my eyes leaked tears; my stomach ached from laughter. Boy Swallows Universe is—I can’t think of a word more apt—magical. This vibrant, vital, altogether miraculous coming-of-age novel marks the debut of an exquisitely gifted storyteller. . . and what’s more, it’s transformative: After reading Trent Dalton’s book, you won’t be the same as you were before.”- A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window
“Welcome to the weird and wonderful universe of Trent Dalton, whose first work of fiction is, without exaggeration, the best Australian novel I have read in more than a decade. . . . The last 100 pages of Boy Swallows Universe propel you like an express train to a conclusion that is profound and complex and unashamedly commercial. . . . The book is jam-packed with such witty and profound insights into what’s wrong and what’s right with Australia and the world. . . . I read it in two sittings and immediately want to read it again. In its deft integration of the sacred and the profane, of high ideals and low villainy, it somehow reminded me of a favorite French movie, Diva. A rollicking ride, rich in philosophy, wit, truth and pathos.”- Sydney Morning Herald
“A wonderful surprise: sharp as a drawer full of knives in terms of subject matter; unrepentantly joyous in its child’s-eye view of the world; the best literary debut in a month of Sundays.’- The Weekend Australian
“It is such a pleasant shock to encounter a new Australian novel in which joy is shamelessly deployed. . . . It is a story in thrall to the potential the world holds for lightness, laughter, beauty, forgiveness, redemption, and love. . . . [Dalton] invests this unlikely cast and milieu with considerable energy, wit and charm. He delights in the play of language and imagination that a child can summon: the sense in which the clear moral eye of youth can critique and adore simultaneously without judgment or adult moral finessing.”- The Australian
“Trent Dalton is the most extraordinary writer—a rare talent. A major new voice on the Australian literary scene has arrived.”- Nikki Gemmell
“An astonishing achievement. Dalton is a breath of fresh air—raw, honest, funny, moving, he has created a novel of the most surprising and addictive nature. Unputdownable.”- David Wenham
About the author:
Trent Dalton is an award-winning journalist at The Weekend Australian Magazine. His writing includes several short and feature-length film screenplays. He was nominated for a 2010 AFI Best Short Fiction screenplay award for his latest film, Glenn Owen Dodds, which also won the prestigious International Prix Canal award at the world's largest short film festival, the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. Dalton's debut feature film screenplay, In the Silence, is currently in production.
Ooo I agree, that is a great intro to a book! Thanks for sharing this Debbie!
ReplyDeleteIt was definitely my pleasure Ali
DeleteI remember seeing this book.. the cover is so wonderfully eye catching.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the review.. sounds interesting.
http://henatayeb.blogspot.com
it is eye catching thanks for stopping by!
DeleteI can see why that caught your attention. :)
ReplyDeleteright!
DeleteI think this has great potential, I sure like the premise and already half in love with Eli.
ReplyDeletea woman after my own heart Kathryn :)
DeleteBoy Swallows Universe sure has a lot of wonderful praise! I love stories with magic, love, fate, and crime. I like that this takes blade in the 1980's. I was a kid in the 80's :) The excerpt makes me think that this is a fun read! I love when characters have humor! Thanks for sharing :)
ReplyDeleteLindy@ A Bookish Escape
My daughter grew up in the 80s too Lindy and this does sound like a fun read and I can't wait to open the pages of my copy!
DeleteSOunds to be a good one :)
ReplyDeleteI know right
DeleteThe cover caught my eye too. Sounds really interesting.
ReplyDeleteMelanie @ Hot Listens & Books of My Heart
I totally agree
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