All the Titles Worth Adding to Your Shelf

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The winners of the 2022 Indie Book Awards have been announced, and we were not surprised to see who dominated the competition this year

First established in 2008, the Indie Book Award aims to recognise the best Australian talent, as chosen by independent booksellers. Some of the biggest Aussie authors that you’ve read or heard about have once won an Indie Book Award. Famous alumni include Tim Winton with BreathAnh Do with The Happiest Refugee and Jane Harper with The Dryto name a few.

So if you’ve been looking for some new titles to binge, you must add all of the winners below to your TBR pile.

Without further ado, the winner of the 2022 Indie Book Award is…

Trent Dalton's "Love Stories" is the winner of the 2022 Indie Book Award — Image: @trentdaltonauthor

That’s right, the winner of the 2022 Indie Book Award is Trent Dalton’s Love Stories. This is the second time that Dalton has taken out the top prize, after he won back in 2019 with his bestselling debut novel Boy Swallows Universe. Since his win, that same title has been picked up by Netflix to join their repertoire of original movies.

Back in 2021, Trent Dalton sat on the corner of Adelaide and Albert Street in Brisbane for two months. As strangers passed him by, he asked them one simple and direct question: “Can you please tell me a love story?”

From those poignant and heartfelt conversations with strangers, came the birth of Love Stories. It is a collection of observations, reflections and memories of people from all walks of life falling in love, out of love and never letting go of the special few they keep tucked away in their hearts.

On winning the award for a second time, Dalton has said:

“I am thrilled and gobsmacked and humbled and deeply grateful. I got all cheeseball weepy when I got the news. I got all sentimental about this beautiful recognition because this book means so much to me and because Australia’s independent booksellers mean everything to the Australian book industry.

I sat on a corner for two months asking random strangers to tell me love stories but every passing day of every passing year our independent booksellers are sharing love stories with their incredible customers through that sacred transaction of buying and selling these paper treasures we call books. Thank you to the booksellers for this incredible award.”

Here’s what you can expect from Love Stories:

“A blind man yearns to see the face of his wife of thirty years. A divorced mother has a secret love affair with a priest. A geologist discovers a three-minute video recorded by his wife before she died. A tree lopper’s heart falls in a forest. A working mum contemplates taking photographs of her late husband down from her fridge. A girl writes a last letter to the man she loves most, then sets it on fire. A palliative care nurse helps a dying woman converse with the angel at the end of her bed. A renowned 100-year-old scientist ponders the one great earthly puzzle he was never able to solve: ‘What is love?’”

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