‘Effortlessly charming and tender, The Travelling Library is many things. It’s a love letter to the books we walk with long after we’ve finished reading them. It’s a mind-bending, page-turning escapist adventure. It’s about music, family, young love, the solace of imagined worlds, the truth of fiction and the fiction of truth. It’s a profound meditation on boys growing up to be good men despite the shadows around them. Dalgarno’s writing fizzes and sparkles on every page. A brilliant, timely novel.’ Rhett Davis Arborescence

‘The Travelling Library will seduce you with its bookish magic. It is a story that wends above and below ground, through time and through every story you have ever loved. Bold and vast and a loving paean to the jubilation and difficulty and triumphs of adolescence, The Travelling Library gathers up fathers, sons, friends, myths, games, hopes and desires and sends them all on a journey to discover what it means to be a good person, to strive and to believe. It is a wide-eyed, beautiful, joyfully written marvel. It is Paul Dalgarno at his finest, unique and exploratory, just what Australian literature needs.’ Michelle Johnston, The Revisionists

‘A love letter to literature and how stories in all forms not only help us make sense of life, but are integral to how we live it, The Travelling Library is also an adventure story, with more than one character on a quest to become a better man, with a time-bending narrative that reflects how family relationships and friendships ebb and flow across time, space and memory. Tender, erudite and wildly imaginative.’ Angela Savage, Mother of Pearl

‘Paul Dalgarno's The Travelling Library is a stunning feat of the imagination. At once a multi-generational family drama and wildly entertaining childhood subterranean adventure, you'll be kept guessing all the way to the final pages as to how this utterly unique novel will go. Mind-bending, huge-hearted, underpinned by themes of familial love and the lengths fathers will go to protect their children – Dalgarno dares to throw so much into the mix, and the result is absolutely glorious.’ Wayne Marshall, Shirl 

‘The Travelling Library is Paul Dalgarno’s most ambitious novel to date, and may well be his best. There is deep humanity and dark humour in this maximalist adventure, straddling the past, the present-ish and the future. I was entranced by the persistence of plucky antihero Keely battling against the vicissitudes of an often cruel world. The text is simultaneously rollicking and melancholy, a rare combination that is a Dalgarno trademark. The narrative collapses and reinterprets time and place, literature and geography, cyberspace and memory. The intergenerational story threads illustrate the persistence of trauma in families, but also the strength of love – and imagination. Eliot’s notion in Burnt Norton that ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past’ is given a Scottish-Australian twist. A homage to the consolations of literature, it is also a reminder of things the novel can do that other artforms cannot. You will be beguiled. And if not: stiff nips.’ Michael Winkler, Griefdogg