All Our Shimmering Skies

Trent Dalton

The international bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton returns with a glorious novel destined to become another Australian classic.

Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain down, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger’s daughter, is looking to the skies and running for her life. Inside a duffel bag, she carries a stone heart, alongside a map to lead her to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer who she believes put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. The treasure lies before them, but close behind them trails the dark. And above them, always, are the shimmering skies.

A story about gifts that fall from the sky, curses we dig from the earth and the secrets we bury inside ourselves, All Our Shimmering Skies is an odyssey of true love and grave danger, of darkness and light, of bones and blue skies. It is a love letter to Australia and an ode to the art of looking up – a buoyant, beautiful and magical novel, abrim with warmth, wit and wonder.

All Our Shimmering Skies is the follow-up to Boy Swallows Universe we could have never imagined, but the one Dalton was destined to gift us. It's a story of heroes and villains, foxes and water buffalo, fighter planes and birds of prey, real magic and real love, epitaphs and aphorisms, lost treasure and lost life. It's a love letter to the nation. It's your favourite childhood adventure story dictated by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and William Shakespeare, with a score by Franz Liszt. It's dead serious. It's completely ridiculous. It's all of these things and more.

- Booktopia

A glinting, big-hearted miracle of a book

- Richard Glover

A work of shimmering originality and energy, with extraordinary characters and a clever, thrilling plot ... unputdownable

- Sydney Morning Herald

Release: Oct-2020

ISBN: 9781460753903

RRP (AUD): $32.99

Pages: 448

Format: Paperback & Hardback & ebook

Category: Fiction: Uplit

Trent Dalton

Trent Dalton is a staff writer for the Weekend Australian Magazine and a former assistant editor of The Courier Mail. He’s a two-time winner of a Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism, a four-time winner of a Kennedy Award for Excellence in NSW Journalism and a four-time winner of the national News Awards Features Journalist of the Year. His debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe, published by HarperCollins in 2018, is a much-loved national bestseller and critically acclaimed, winning the 2019 Indie Book of the Year Award, the MUD Literary Prize, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the People’s Choice Award at the 2019 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In addition, at the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards, the book won a record four ABIA Awards, including the prestigious Book of the Year Award. Boy Swallows Universe has been published across thirty-four English language and translation territories.

HarperCollins Australia

HarperCollins Publishing Australia is the second largest trade publishing company in Australia, with a publishing program that spans a broad range of categories across both adult and children’s books, from multi award winning and bestselling authors, both locally and internationally, to cutting edge debut authors. Our company consists of HarperCollins General Books, HarperCollins Children’s Books, ABC Books and Harlequin Australia, and we are the proud home to many of Australia’s biggest names in literature, past and present.