Trent Dalton breaks a literary sales barrier with Boy Swallows Universe

Trent Dalton’s novel Boy Swallows Universe hit the half a million mark on Wednesday, 20 days before the release of his follow-up, All Our Shimmering Skies.

Author Trent Dalton.

Trent Dalton has thrown down the gauntlet to some of Australian literature’s heaviest hitters with his 2018 debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe, cracking the 500,000-copy sales barrier.

The novel hit the half a million mark on Wednesday, 20 days before the release of his follow-up, All Our Shimmering Skies.

“I wrote that book thinking I’d be lucky if five people read it — my Mum, my three older brothers and my long-suffering wife. That number makes me proud, and ill,’’ Dalton said.

“I’m so bloody touched. It’s just a book about hope. It gets good. No matter how bad it gets, it’s got to get good. All you need is time.’’

Dalton’s second novel will hit bookstores at the same time as new novels by Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan (The Living Sea of Waking Dreams) and best-selling author Craig Silvey (Honeybee).

A month later, dual Miles Franklin winner Alex Miller will release his non-fiction book Max, and Miles Franklin winner Sofie Laguna will publish her new novel, Infinite Splendours.

Dalton’s second novel is very different from his first. It is set mainly in the Northern Territory during World War II and has at its centre two women on an outback odyssey.

Boy Swallows Universe, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, is set in the Brisbane in which Dalton, 41, grew up.

It is being adapted as a film, with Joel Edgerton attached, and for the Queensland Theatre Company. In this sense, it follows Silvey’s big-selling 2009 debut novel, Jasper Jones, which was filmed by Rachel Perkins and put on stage.

Dalton, a reporter on The Australian, still has a bit of ground to make up on the biggest sellers of this millennium. To catch them, he might need more sex and investment tips in his novels.

When Nielsen Bookscan in September 2019 put out a list of the top-selling books in Australia over the previous 20 years, No 1 was EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (1.37 million since publication in 2012) and No 2 was Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor (1.2 million since publication in 2016).