All Our Shimmering Skies

By: Trent Dalton

Narrated by: Ruby Rees

Length: 15 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

The author of Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton returns with All Our Shimmering Skies - the best-selling, critically acclaimed novel destined to become another Australian classic.

"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)

Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain down, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, turns once again to the sky for guidance. She carries a stone heart inside a duffel bag next to the map that leads to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer who 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. Run, Molly, run, says the daytime sky. Run to the vine forests. Run to northern Australia's wild and magical monsoon lands. Run to friendship. Run to love. Run. Because the graverobber's coming, Molly, and the night-time sky is coming with him. So run, Molly, run.

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

"Dalton is an author of 19th-century expansiveness, one with a sense that intelligence, talent for characterisation and sheer narrative brio can still be the whole cloth of the writer's ambition...it is storytelling manna, fallen straight from the Territorian skies." (The Australian)

"Achingly beautiful and poetic in its melancholy, All Our Shimmering Skies is a majestic and riveting tale of curses and the true meaning of treasure." (Booklist, starred review)

"As Australian as outback red dirt and as universal as the sky young Molly Hook's journey takes place beneath, All Our Shimmering Skies is an open-hearted wonder, by turns heartbreaking and full of hope, no less than an instant classic." (Venero Armanno)

"Australia has a new literary hero. Molly Hook - part Cordelia, part Jo March, part Pippi Longstocking - pulls us into a story and a landscape that is mythic, beguiling and almost hallucinatory in its beauty. And instantly recognisable as our own." (Kristina Olsson)

"This is storytelling at its absolute purest, a truly courageous expression of longing, hope and love...against unimaginable odds." (Asher Keddie)

"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)

©2020 Trent Dalton (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers

A little disappointed

This book was given rave reviews but, I must admit, it was too "high pitched" for my liking. Reader was too dramatic and as this went on for most of the book, it was too frantic for me.
s
Story was excellent but I think the telling of it lacked depth.

A wonderful narrative of love and hope

I am glad that this novel was different to Boy swallows universe. It makes both novels unique.

This tales is about resilience, love and respect for the land and how the past is woven into the future and the present . It voices the connection we have with family and the need to belong. It is about friendship, hurt and healing under the umbrella of the southern sky using the artful technique imagery and in once of a child.

Somewhat disappointing but overall ok

This story was great for the first 2 thirds, very engaging and the characters well drawn. Once it gets to the long walk in the bush part however, I feel it loses its way. Too drawn out, too predictable, too weird. Every scene is a cliché with no original thinking. Boy Swallows Universe kept me guessing until the very end but this one not at all. The narrator's accent is a bit over the top Australian - not sure anyone really speaks like Molly - and the dramatic scenes were very loud. I will read further books from this author as he has the ability to create something exceptional and Australian - but not so much with this one.

Don’t waste your credit

Not even a bit enjoyable despite excellent narration. The story waffles on after the first two chapters and it just seems like random words thrown together. Awful.