Second novel shimmering

All Our Shimmering Skies

Author: Trent Dalton Publisher: Harper Collins RRP: $32.99 Reviewer: Tobi Loftus

TRENT Dalton’s latest novel All Our Shimmering Skies is a

love letter to Australia.

A love letter to its wide open spaces, to our ancient and modern history, and most importantly our beautiful big sky that is so blue during the day and just stunning at night.

A sky that guides us, a sky that drops us gifts, a sky that is there for all of us in our way.

Set during the bombing of Darwin in World War Two, All

Our Shimmering Skies follows Molly Hook, a young girl who lives in a cemetery and is the daughter of a gravedigger.

Growing up, Molly is led to believe her family was cursed by an Indigenous medicine man called Longcoat Bob after her grandfather stole some gold from him.

This curse, she believes led to her mother leaving her as a child, led to her father and uncle’s alcoholic nature.

Her closest friend is a shovel called Bert.

As more things go wrong in Molly’s life, she starts to receive gifts from the sky, including the key to finding where Longcoat Bob is so she can try get the curse lifted.

What follows is an adventure of epic proportions, a journey of hope, and love, and loss, and perseverance.

It’s a journey of self discovery, forgiveness, acceptance.

It’s an instant Australian classic, and while set during World War Two, a novel so relevant to our times.

Sprinkled within the book is an array of interesting characters like the entrancing Greta Maze and the Japanese fighter pilot Yukio who fell from the sky. These characters compliment Molly’s journey, with their own being just as moving and important to the novel’s key premise and message:

“Carry all you own. Own all you carry.”

Trent Dalton’s first novel Boy Swallows Universe was a semiauthobiographical novel, which Dalton claimed at this latest novel’s book launch in Brisbane on Tuesday night was the novel he had to write to then be able to let himself write stories like Molly’s.

And thank god he wrote it. This book will make you smile, it'll make you cry, it’ll take your breath away.

It’s got the same magical realism readers came to love about Boy Swallows Universe, but it expands it. It’s just as poetic, if not more so.

It’s just as good, if not better than his debut.

If there is one book you are going to read this year, make sure it’s All Our Shimmering Skies.