Books like Boy Swallows Universe
Eli Bell, growing up in a Brisbane suburb in the 1980s with a mute brother who writes in the air, a stepfather who deals heroin and a babysitter who was a famous prison escapee, wants to be a good man.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Boy Swallows Universe
My Brother Jack
David Meredith grows up in a Melbourne suburb after the First World War in the shadow of his tough, generous older brother Jack, and becomes a journalist while Jack's luck runs the other way.
Cloudstreet
After the war, two working-class families, the Pickles and the Lambs, each struck by disaster, end up sharing a big rundown house on Cloud Street in Perth, for twenty years.
Funny Boy
Arjie, a Tamil boy growing up in Colombo in the 1970s and 80s, discovers he is gay as the tensions that will become Sri Lanka's civil war tighten around his family.
Son of a Trickster
Jared, a sixteen-year-old Haisla boy in Kitimat who sells weed cookies to pay the family's bills, starts seeing things that can't be real, and his mother may be a witch.
The Round House
A thirteen-year-old boy on an Ojibwe reservation seeks justice after his mother is brutally attacked, navigating a legal system designed to fail Native people.
The Harp in the South
The Darcys, a poor Irish Catholic family, live in a crowded terrace in Surry Hills in Sydney in the 1940s, where Roie, the elder daughter, is growing up.
The Eye of the Sheep
Jimmy Flick, a boy who sees the world differently, lives with his loving mother and his violent father in a house in the suburbs of Melbourne.
My Brilliant Career
Sybylla Melvyn, a fiery girl on a struggling farm in the New South Wales bush, wants a life of art and books, and refuses to marry.
The Goldfinch
A boy survives a childhood trauma that chains him to a stolen painting, dragging him through decades of grief, art forgery, and self-destruction.
Breath
Bruce Pike, a paramedic in middle age, remembers growing up in a sawmill town in Western Australia in the 1970s, when he and his friend Loonie fell in with Sando, an ageing surfer who taught them to take risks.
Deacon King Kong
An elderly church deacon in a 1969 Brooklyn housing project shoots a drug dealer in broad daylight, and the whole neighbourhood gets tangled in the fallout.
Bliss
Harry Joy, an advertising man in an Australian city, is dead for nine minutes after a heart attack, and when he comes back he decides he is in Hell.