So there’s a disastrous supply chain situation threatening Christmas book sales all over the country. Lots of book stores, including in Noosa Shire, can’t get the books that everyone wants to buy.
With his new book just out and getting rave reviews, best-selling Brisbane author Trent Dalton should be spitting chips. Is he? Yeah, nah.
“It’s a disaster, but if that’s the worst disaster you’ve got on your plate, you’re doing OK,” he told me this week.
Dalton, 42, has become a national identity as a result of back to back bestsellers Boy Swallows Universe and Beneath Our Shimmering Skies, but his new book, Love Stories, takes him back to a place he discovered years ago in his other career as a journalist on The Australian’s Weekend Magazine, which is the gift of discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.
This was exemplified in a six-part series called Sunny Avenue, in which Dalton door-knocked up and down a suburban street in Brisbane and discovered the situations, the dramas, the people, the relationships, the joys and the tragedies that peopled his own young and troubled life.
Not everyone can knock on a door and get a story. Trent Dalton has the life experience that enables him to do it fearlessly and lovingly.
And that’s where Love Stories starts.
He says: “In the book I acknowledge the residents of Sunny Avenue who saved me as I was coming off the back of the madness of the success of my first book. I’d been so caught up in my own story that it was a relief to get into the middle of other people’s stories.
“I’d been back in the dark places of my own life, and this put me in the place I’ve always loved in journalism, talking to random strangers and hearing their stories. Love Stories came out of the same need, and it took 200 interviews over two months to get there.”
Dalton dedicates Love Stories to Kath, the mother of his best friend and a prolific supporter of his journalistic endeavours, who died last Christmas Day, leaving him a sky blue Olivetti manual typewriter to inspire his future work.
Trent writes about this in a letter to Kath (in typewriter script) which begins the book. It’s heart-wrenching, as is much of this beautiful work.
Trent Dalton will be signing books and chatting with customers at Annie’s Books On Peregian from 9-11am on Saturday 27 November. Be there or be square. Phil Jarratt’s full interview with Trent Dalton will appear next week.
