Any description of this book could not possibly do it justice as it so strange and absolutely addictive. If you’re looking for plot, characterisation and fabulously inventive writing, it has that. If you want violence, bloodlust and evil, it has that too. Fantastic visualisation of settings, drama and landscape? Yes, it has all that. In the weird and wonderful mind of Australian writer Trent Dalton, this bizarre story could have fallen flat in a mess of unintelligible fragments, but he somehow manages to turn it into a masterpiece of imagination and compulsive writing that leaves the reader bereft and blinking at the intrusion of the real world at the end.

I've come to this quite late, but better late than never.

Boy Swallows Universe is a heavily stylised bildungsroman set in Brisbane in the 1980s - by all accounts quite a sketchy place run by sketchy people. Eli Bell, our hero, has a life that is sketchy with the colour turned full on. He lives with his silent brother August in a house that was home made, room by room, with an depressive mother and a heroin dealing stepfather; his absent biological father is an alcoholic; his only friend is an elderly convicted murderer; and he aspires to work for Bich Dang and her drug cartel.

Each chapter is written - and titled - with a sensationalist three word newspaper headline. Each chapter is a mini-story but they come together to form a narrative arc. Mostly this is Eli staying "one step ahead of the shoe-shine; two steps away from the county line" as Simon and Garfunkel put it. The various adventures are lurid, cartoonish. But despite the schlock-horror, there is always the sense that there's a real story at its heart, with likeable boys who are doing whatever it takes to survive in a world that would eat them for breakfast. There are gangsters, jails, social workers, a prosthetic limb factory and a host of other pitfalls just waiting for them, but we know Eli will win the day.

For much of the novel, the reader wonders how on Earth this can be brought to a resolution. The situations get more and more absurd, and it seems to be impossible for all the ends to be tied up. But they do get tied up with a pretty bow at the end.

And it is so very Australian. From the slang to the mannerisms to the locations. It's all about Indooroopilly, Darra and Boggo Road. It's about the stress of trying to seem casual while worrying that everyone else is trying to screw you (Australia is seriously the most uptight place I can think of). And it's about the truly abysmal standard of journalism we have to ensure.

Boy Swallows Universe is a rollercoaster of a novel, but as if by magic, it stays firmly on the tracks.

Very unusual but almost addictively readable. Very funny, human and alive, it was a joy to read. I hadn't come across Trent Dalton before but I'm not surprised he is as widely admired as he is in Australia. It felt like a breath of fresh air and I can't wait to read more.

Highly recommended.

A novel that explores crime, magic, and fate - beautifully written on every single page with excellent characters and narration. This book is not one to miss!

Boy Swallows Universe was a complex, challenging but rewarding read.

Set in Brisbane in the 1980s, the complex nature of social classes, the drug trade and an unerring sense of hope against all the odds are the main themes. As we enter the stream of consciousness of Eli we enter a difficult landscape of a child who has been exposed to extreme situations that many of us couldn't imagine. But there is a magical quality throughout, beginning with his brother August who refuses to speak and continuing with events that are slightly out of this world.

It meanders through childhood and teenage experiences, all with the dysfunctional backdrop of a broken family and a neighbourhood that faces the perils of a growing drug trade. At times, these sections were long and I did struggle. But as Eli grows and the threads of his ambition and hope come together it becomes an uplifting and wonderful read.

It was truly unique and one I won't forget for a while.

Just wow. A harsh tale of two boys, Eli and August, growing up in 80s Brisbane amongst drug dealers, prison, ex-con babysitters and a whole colourful background of other characters. A lot of sleep was lost reading this book as I read "just a few more pages" until the book was finished. The way that Trent Dalton writes from the perspective of Eli is just amazing. Part-autobiographical, part-fiction this book comes very highly recommended indeed.

I love the cover of this book and I must admit that sometimes fir me a cover sells the book more than the blurb or author’s name.
I enjoyed this coming of age story set in a country that I don’t know much about and was a great way to learn different things that used to happen there as well as in other parts of the world.
While the writing was a bit odd for me to keep up, I enjoyed the overall plot and story with the perfect characters to tell it, the drama and suspense of family, friends and friendship, angsty and heartbreaking moments and all the drugs and dealing with the underground world. Yes, it has a bit more of swearing than I usually like but I got over it as I felt that in a way, even in real life, it’s part of the story and the way the characters are.

One of the perks of trying out new books is the chance to find the latest styles of narrative, and times and places that one would never encounter otherwise. This is one such book. The splash of colour on the cover, the ambiguous (sort of) title does not necessarily give a particularly clear picture of the content. It was one of a kind content. If there was a lot less swearing, I would have liked it enough to give it a full five stars. For those people who find it easy to ignore or even enjoy swearing, this should not be a problem. Given the story itself, I do understand why that might be part of the whole picture.

The entire story is set in 1980s Australia. The harsh situations that people find themselves in and the way that they hold themselves above water paints a bleak picture. Within this bleak picture, our main man/boy Eli and his mostly mute brother Gus make their own special way. They hobnob with gangsters, drugs, negligent parent figures, convicts, all the while they pick and choose what they learn from each of these people who play a varying degree of prominent roles in their lives.  It is a fast-paced story with a lot of heart-rending moments that are not focused upon, we just move on to the next incident, and the people deal with it, they are that tough.

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

“The Matrix” meets “Prisoner Cell Block H” in the style of Tim Winton and Paulo Coelho.

The book is set in working class 1980s Brisbane, Australia.

The first party narrator is the precocious Elli Bell – who at the book’s opening is 12 years old and living with his mother, stepfather Lyle and slightly older brother Augustus (a mute who obsessively paints or makes art while communicating by writing with his finger in the air). Their mother is estranged from their father we learn over time after an incident in which is drinking caused him to nearly drive over a dam and nearly drown the two children – an incident which haunts Elli’s dreams, and Gus’s art and which seems to have lead to Gus’s retreat into wordlessness (partly it seems to protect what he believes to be his secret – that he died in the accident and was resurrected, not for the first time). Much as Elli loves his mother and sees Lyle as a father figure – his real mentor is a convicted but nor released murderer Slim, legendary for his prison escapes and for surviving the resulting punishment cell when recaptured).

Elli discovers that Lyle and his mother are drug dealing working for a local drug lord and prosthetic limb manufacturer – his attempts to improve their fortunes by suggesting that Lyle hoards drugs on his own account (to take advantage of a federal clamp down on smuggling) backfires with Lyle being abducted (and probably dismembered), his mother imprisoned and his own finger chopped off – forcing Lyle and Gus to live with their father (whose only occupations are reading, drinking and getting abusive) and Elli to hatch a plan to use the skills Slim has taught him to visit his mother on Christmas Day (concerned she will commit suicide otherwise) – all the while Elli aims at his lifelong ambition to be a crime reported while falling for Caitlin Spies – a crime reporter.

All of this is shot through with a mix of magic realism (in particular a mysterious phone under Lyle’s house), meditative and rather simplistic reflection, Vietnamese drug gang warfare, 80s working class Aussie banter and colour. Elli seemingly grows up over many years of the book – although this is only marked by Elli deliberately commenting on it (the 12 year old Elli is old before his age, the 17 year old acts as a child).

Large elements of the book are apparently based on the author’s upbringing – which puts paid to criticisms it is portraying an unbelievable world but not to the question of why I would want to read about that world.

I did see a review which compared the book to “Milkman” and there are many similarities: a precocious narrator with a strong narrative voice, living in a violent world and a family distorted and broken by that endemic violence, yet who somehow lives at a level of detachment from that world. But whereas I loved “Milkman” I could not rate this book as strongly – perhaps due to its concentration on masculinity; perhaps that it seems to ignore the real victims of the crime/violence – the drug addicts – and is hard not see as glorfying the violence it portrays; perhaps because it mixes in too many other genres/styles and perhaps ultimately because it lacks maturity and judgement in the writing while nevertheless representing a promising debut.

Extraordinary coming of age story that stole my heart! Boy Swallows Universe is his debut novel but I've loved the authors writing for years. The characters were brought to life in this story. There were goods and bads and with mixture of fact and fiction. It was a great read.

I am really sorry but I could not get on board with the style of writing used in here.
I found the super clipped, short sentences actually quite distracting, and could not get drawn into the story, so I have abandoned reading it altogether.

A fantastic coming of age story et in Brisbane in the 1980s. It follows the story of Eli, a boy with a mute brother, a heroin dealer as a stepfather, and an estranged father. His love for, and of, his mother, is one of the cornerstones of his very existence so when she is subsequently jailed his life is tuned upside down.

I am utterly confused. Like, confused to the extent that my mind feels as though it has been put through a high-powered blender. I have a feeling (if I can pull it from the muddle of my thoughts) that, in Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton was going for abstract, fluid; a plot-structure that was as shifting and granular as the facets of human memory. This novel, after-all, is supposed to have been wrought from his own early childhood experiences and, maybe if I could actually piece together what was going on, I would lauded him for an attempt well done. I know, I suppose more than most, what it is to look back on your early years and see flashes; no birthday parties playing as if on a film-reel, no faces tangible in blown-out colour. But, the fact is, Boy Swallows Universe feels more like my own barely-there memories than ones that can be conceivably turned into a successful novel - scrambled images fading to black. It was as though we were getting half of the story, a flash of every scene where the important bits (the ones that click together and make everything start to make sense) happen in some dank backroom firmly off-screen. Words were tangled up on top of one another; plonked together randomly as if it was written by one of those AI machines, only making the already scrambled, confused narrative-arc even further from my grasp. Oh, and how I longed to grasp it but unfortunately, Boy Swallows Universe continued to lack the corporeal form that would have made it possible.

His brother never speaks. His mother is in prison. His only friend is a criminal. And unless he gets into prison to see his mother, he doesn't think he'll ever see her again. Also, his step-father deals drugs, and his father – just isn't there. When Eli's life falls apart, he is left to pick up the pieces. To try and make things right, to figure out what is real and what is not, to save his mother's life, and to find out where all the people who've gone missing from his life are.

This book was so full of beautiful language that it hurt my hand to write down every quote that touched me. Full of a universe (see what I did there?!) of words, depicting a world so broken but yet so beautiful at the same time – it really blew me away. It was also quite philosophical, in a way – leading to deep thoughts and mental examination. It focuses on the strangeness of life, and how we can never control it – however much we want to or try to, it steers its own path, and all we can do is cling on and do our best to steer down the right paths.

“She says the universe stole her boy's words when she wasn't looking.”

In a way, this is a rather strange book. It felt a little removed from the normal world – but it did drag me away into it's own universe. It was probably partly to do with the setting – Brisbane, Australia; something I don't think I've ever experienced as a book setting before. And also, partly to do with the slight eccentricities of that characters – and, in a way, just to do with the book itself. Parts of it felt a little crazy – but that is, in many ways, just like real life. It throws some pretty crazy curveballs every so often.

“August is one year older than the universe.”

The chapter headings were a part of this book that I especially appreciated. They almost tell their own story – from 'Boy Writes Words' to 'Boy Loses Balance', all the way to 'Boy Swallows Universe'. And yes, they (almost) all begin with boy. I love how even the chapter headings wind together to form their own little story-world, and there's just something about them that calls to me. I love chapter headings – and I wish more books now-a-days had them. I feel like they're becoming less and less of a thing – and it's a shame. Not only do they make me feel like every bit of the book was crafted and created with care, but they give the reader little hints at the story as you go along – it's like the book is writing its own personal mystery!

“A giant puddle would fill with the silver reflection of a full moon.”

I would warn any younger readers that this is not a book I'd recommend for them – the summary didn't really give any warning of this, but I found some of the book a little disturbing. There was an undercurrent of crime running over the beauty of friendship, brotherhood, and family this book revolved around. So – if you're not an older teen/adult – proceed with caution!

Have you read any books filled with beautiful writing recently? What were they – I'd love to know! (I am always searching for those books than thrill me with the beauty of their writing. Always.)

“What are you reading?”

I dread this question, making sure I sum up the plot in a succinct yet comprehensive manner without giving too much away or the wrong impression. ‘Boy Swallows Universe’ is perhaps the hardest book I have had to sum up in a while.

“Well it’s about a boy in Australia in the 80s who has an ex-con as a babysitter and a heroin dealer for a step-dad. His mother is an addict and his brother is a mute, who writes messages in the sky with his finger. It’s not depressing though, honest!”

You mention convicts and drug deals and people expect a heavy read about a troubled childhood, when in fact Boy Swallows Universe is far from that. It is funny, thrilling and an intimate look at relationships and how trauma can affect them.

The protagonist Eli Bell has spent his life surrounded by complicated characters, having to learn which Rolling Stones song soothes his mother after a drug binge and how to interpret his mute brother’s finger writing and the meanings behind his messages (Caitlyn Spies? Your end is a dead blue wren?). Aside from the occasional provocation of his step-father, Eli is presented as the more grounded member of the Bell family. It isn’t until later that you understand how the events of Eli’s past have affected him.

Loosely based on aspects from the author’s childhood, he really was babysat by an ex-con called Slim and his step-dad was a dealer, Boy Swallows Universe is a debut novel full of richly detailed characters, beautifully written prose and a fast-paced plot which remains on the right side of believable. I read a few other reviews which complained about the bleak subject matter, the graphic violence and regular use of profanity, but this did not even register with me because none of it felt gratuitous.

This is a truly unique coming-of-age novel that is equally touching as it is engaging, which makes the news that is has been bought by actor Joel Edgerton for TV adaptation even more exciting.

Thank you to NetGalley for my review copy of this book.

Wow, this was quite a read!

Eli Bell and his mute brother August have a severely troubled upbringing, his mum and her partner heavily involved in drug dealing - Eli and Gus are exposed to all the violence and horrors that go with this.

Gus doesn't speak, but writes words in the sky - and his messages presage future events.

Eli struggles to resolve the horrific situations he experiences, and endeavours to capture this by becoming a journalist, a struggle in its own right.

I didn't realise until after finishing the book that the characters and story are very much based upon Trent Dalton's own experiences of growing up. It's a long and often hard read, but for the sheer adrenaline of the final 10%, keep reading! In Dalton's own words, it is a 'crazy, sad, tragic and beautiful story'.

Wonderful read, give it a chance to get going and you won’t regret it! Full review at https://joebloggshere.tumblr.com/post/187347646586/boy-swallows-universe-by-trent-dalton-a-magical

I’m always a little wary of critically acclaimed, and over-hyped books, often they are not as good as they are reputed to be. So I started this one with trepidation. Initial impressions are that is honest, raw, and full of experiences of urban life in Brisbane that do not make easy reading.

Eli and August, are brothers, their carers’ lives are driven by drugs, and the boys have to constantly battle adversity to keep the family together. Despite the family’s dysfunctionality, the love the boys feel for their mother and each other dominates this story and puts into perspective many of the bizarre and often frightening experiences they endure.

At the end of this lengthy book, there is a note from the author, about how the story came into being, what it means to him and the story’s themes. It is, on reading this that you appreciate, it is more of a memoir than fiction, although seen through a young child’s and then young boys eyes. I wish I’d read this note first because it grounds this complex story, and makes it more relatable.

There is a great deal of imagination in this story, magic if you like, which I attributed to a young boy’s need to escape from the harshness of his life, and give himself the power to overcome some its more sordid aspects.

I’m still not sure if I liked it, but the writing is engaging and authentic, the story moves forward in an understandable way, and it gives an insider view of Australian life, particularly life in Brisbane and Queensland, through a young person’s viewpoint.

The characters are the lifeblood of this story, and the author indicates that they are based on people he knows or a medley of them, in his personal and journalistic life. Many are not likeable, and the danger the children are exposed to is disturbing, but they are real, and the reality of this story is what stays with you.

An unusual tale of growing up and surviving life in a gritty urban setting. With a cast of characters, covering the spectrum of humanity, and the humour, love and magic required to reach adulthood.

I received a copy of this book from Harper Collins UK - Harper Fiction - Borough Press via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Boy Swallows Universe is a book mainly based on two brothers which one of whom doesn't speak and the other is coming of age on Brisbane.
The book contains drugs,violence and much more. A emotional rollercoaster.

This is a story of a boy brought up in a bad area of Brisbane by questionable adults. I shows him and his brother efforts, trying to live a good and acceptable life. I get very depressed reading this kind of book about children and often wish there was a way of making sure children were wanted before they are born.