Trent Dalton reveals new novel Lola In The Mirror will confront Australia’s homelessness crisis

While his record-breaking debut is being turned into a big-name TV series, Trent Dalton’s next work tackles a heartbreaking topic based on 17 years of collecting real stories from our city streets.

He’s one of Australia’s best-known and best-loved writers – an award-winning record-breaker 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.

Don’t look away … Trent Dalton says Australia is ‘neck-deep in a national housing crisis’.

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 extremely 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.

Hard facts driving fiction … homeless people living at Musgrave Park in Brisbane.

“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.

‘Big-hearted and blackly funny’ … Lola In The Mirror is due for publication in October 2023.

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”. It will be published on October 4 and is available for pre-order now.

The title refers to a challenging journey of discovery that must unfold for one of the protagonists as the story develops.

Explaining it, Dalton said: “There is this incredibly personal and intimate and sometimes terrifying thing that each and every one of us do every day … I’m talking about looking into the mirror. That deeply confronting moment when it’s all quiet and still and you look real deep inside yourself and you see all of your irretrievable past and all of your tricky present and all your possible futures. I wanted to write a book that felt like that.”

Big story, big names … Trent Dalton with Travis Fimmel (right) on the set of the Netflix adaptation of Boy Swallows Universe.

Originally published as Trent Dalton reveals new novel Lola In The Mirror will confront Australia’s homelessness crisis