A Novel
by Trent Dalton
Recommended by 3 notable people, including Zoë Foster Blake and Tom Bradby
Check price on AmazonRecommended by public sources
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See customer reviews on Amazon →Punchy, often lyrical first-person narration pulls you into Eli Bell’s 1980s Brisbane, where childhood wonder collides with crime, magic, and family mess. What works best is its voice-driven immersion — vivid scenes, eccentric characters, and a tender edge that makes stakes feel personal. The main limitation is occasional tonal whiplash: the prose wanders into long digressions and sentimental flourishes that slow momentum. Expect an emotional mix of warmth and blunt brutality that will delight some readers and fray others.
This summary and audience guidance are AI-generated from the book's description and its recommendation history, last updated June 2026. Recommendations, quotes and sources elsewhere on this page come from published material and are not generated.
An utterly wonderful debut novel of love, crime, magic, fate and a boys coming of age, set in 1980s Australia and infused with the originality, charm, pathos, and heart of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime.The mind can take you anywhere you want to goEli Bells life is complicated. His father i...
Difficulty:hard
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View available editions on AmazonWhy recommended
Recommended by 3 sources and appears in Teen & Young Adult, Adult, and Mystery & Crime.
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
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Consider The Republic by Plato. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Plato stages an extended Socratic conversation that moves from concrete questions about justice into broad proposals about an ideal city, the structure of the soul, and what counts as reality and knowledge. Reading alternates brisk question-and-answer snippets with long, cumulative demonstrations that reward careful attention and annotation. Main value: a wealth of thought experiments for testing political and ethical intuitions. Main limitation: repetitive refutations, long policy sketches and dense metaphysical passages can feel abstruse and slow; patience and some philosophical background help.”
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.
