Gravity Let Me Go

"I used to be the kind of guy who would look at a butterfly and ponder how many wonders that butterfly will see today. Now I’m the kind of guy, Rita said, who looks at a butterfly and wonders how many days the butterfly has left before it dies.”

Trent Dalton is back with another uniquely gripping and unsettling novel - one which balances somehow on the edge of psychological thriller and family drama/comedy in a way that no author I know does.

Gravity Let Me Go is about family, and about how stories become a part of our existence and of our relationships, whether they are ours or ones we have become a part of, and whether we share them or choose to keep them locked away. This novel centers on a murder that took place in an idyllic Australian small suburb, and the increasingly tense impact on the journalist who shared the grisly story in his latest, controversial book. We get an intimate look at the way this story is affecting our main character Noah, from his children and his wife to his safety within his small close-knit community and his grip on reality.

I loved the tension within the family relationships, and the incredible characters that Trent Dalton writes so well, and I love the way the writing can be hilarious and beautiful and uncomfortable all at the same time. I could not put this book down - from the incredible first page to the last sentence I was gripped. The touches of psychological disturbances and magical realism create a novel where I really had no idea how things were going to resolve and I was utterly absorbed until the very end.

It was everything I loved about Lola in the Mirror - the characters and the places and the combination of gritty reality and magical mystery elements - but this story also felt very fresh and new, a book that only Trent Dalton could have written.