New novel hits home
Housing crisis focus for Dalton
He’s one of Australia’s bestknown and best-loved writers – an award-winning recordbreaker whose debut novel was turned into a stage play and a big-name Netflix series hitting screens next year.
But Trent Dalton isn’t one to rest on his laurels. Since Boy Swallows Universe catapulted him to global recognition in 2018, he has kept creating and curating stories, based largely on the real life he observes as a veteran News Corp journalist.
His latest novel, due for release in October, will shine a spotlight on a growing problem in Australia – homelessness.
Unveiling the cover and title of Lola in the Mirror on Wednesday, Dalton said it is about a girl and her mother who flee a “monster” in their own home then find themselves running from police, sleeping in a scrapyard, their identities discarded.
“Lola in the Mirror is an ex
tremely current story about a country neck-deep in a national housing crisis,” said Brisbane-based Dalton.
“It’s the story of the 17 years I spent writing social affairs journalism across this country. The book is filled with stories told to me by people sleeping rough across my city, the people living in the nooks and the crannies and the cracks of life. These things cannot be ignored.
We must create new and wondrous worlds, us writers … but sometimes we must also document the real world unfolding outside the door of the office.”
The novel will likely not flinch from issues like domestic violence and drugs – but, because Dalton is about hope and humour amid the confrontational, there are also dreams of a better life, and a
character’s quest to find it.
Boy Swallows Universe – which has sold more than a million copies and is being brought to life on-screen by stars including Travis Fimmel, Simon Baker and Joel Edgerton – was a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale; second novel All Our Shimmering Skies an extraordinary ”road-trip” set in the wartime Top End, and the Love Stories
collection a joyous riposte to Covid.
Lola in the Mirror is being described as “big-hearted, gritty, magical and moving” by publishers HarperCollins, who added it is a “blackly funny, violent, heartbreaking and beautiful novel”.
The title refers to a challenging journey of discovery that must unfold for one of the protagonists as the story develops.