Lola in the Mirror
In the summer of 2023, a seventeen-year-old girl lives in a broken-down van in a West End scrapyard in Brisbane. She has no name she can safely use, because she and her mother have spent her whole life on the run from the man they left behind with a knife in his throat. Her mother promises the truth will come on her eighteenth birthday: her real name, her real story, everything.
Gifted and fierce, the girl dreams of becoming an internationally famous artist, and she talks to a version of herself in a mirror who seems to know more than she does. But survival keeps intruding. Her mother goes to work for Flora Box, whose fish-and-chip shop fronts a drug operation, and the girl is drawn into the city's underworld even as she falls in love and edges toward the secret of her own identity. A drowning, a betrayal, and a police operation converge on the fragile life she has built.
Trent Dalton's Lola in the Mirror is a lyrical, big-hearted novel about homelessness, art, and self-invention. Vivid and compassionate, it turns Brisbane's margins into a place of danger, beauty, and stubborn hope.
A nameless, gifted seventeen-year-old on the run, dreaming of becoming an artist.
A crime boss whose shopfront hides a drug operation.
The girl's fiercely protective mother, hiding the truth of their past.