Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

Our Shadows tells the story of three generations of family living in Kalgoorlie, where gold was discovered in 1893 by an Irish-born prospector named Paddy Hannan, whose own history weaves in and out of this beguiling novel.

Sisters Nell and Frances were raised by their grandparents and were once closely bound by reading and fantasy. Now they live in Sydney and are estranged. Each in her own way struggles with the loss of their parents.

Little by little the sisters grow to understand the imaginative force of the past and the legacy of their shared orphanhood. Then Frances decides to make a journey home to the goldfields to explore what lies hidden and unspoken in their lives, in the shadowy tunnels of the past.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Historical, Novels, 21st Century, Historical Fiction, Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2020

About the author

Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels BLACK MIRROR, SIXTY LIGHTS, DREAMS OF SPEAKING, SORRY and FIVE BELLS.

Three times shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, her prizes include the WA Premier's Award for Fiction, the Nita B. Kibble Award, the Steele Rudd Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the Adelaide Festival Award for Fiction and the ASAL Gold Medal. She has also been shortlisted for international awards, including the IMPAC and the Prix Femina.

Her fiction has been translated into nine languages. Gail has recently taken up a Professorship at UWS.

Reviews

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nell was born 18 months after her sister Frances. Unfortunately, Mary, their mother died during Nell’s birth. Their father, Jack, not coping, or not wanting to cope, leaves never to return and through his actions turns his daughters into orphans. The sisters fall under the care of their grandparents Fred and Else. Their aunt, Enid also lived with them in Kalgoorlie, 1977.

Although separated in age by over a year the sisters are often mistaken for twins, inseparable for their early years. However, just before entering their teens the sisters start to differ in appearance, growing slowly apart in their interests.

In the fifth chapter, Jones will suddenly, and without any warning jump the narrative into the future, changing the time and the geography. The reader knows it is the present by the references to today’s zeitgeist. Climate change, refugees, hellish conflagrations that leave nothing but ash in their wake.

Chapter six will shift back in time again and change to, Fred, the grandfather’s perspective, and later at chapter eleven, another shift to Nell’s perspective.

There is one more character, not a member of the family, who the narrative follows, and this is Paddy Hannan the gold prospector from 1893, who appears in the opening chapter.

So effectively the story is about three generations of family and how they and the world around them has changed with time.

In the present the sisters are now barely in contact with each other and both have their problems. Frances has lost her husband two years ago and is finding it hard to move on, still finding his presence almost clinging to her. Nell has mental health issues, anxiety and depression, and is far from thriving. Existing rather than living.

With both suffering they decide that tracking down their father may help.

That is about it for the narrative with the strength of the novel coming from the wonderful characters and Jones’ lush prose. Beautifully descriptive, lyrical and poetic, a joy to read.

A highlight for me is when Frances returns to Kalgoorlie, the town that brings the narrative’s branches together, she befriends an aboriginal woman, Val. Val takes her around teaching her the language, and the history of the original owners of the land. This opens the readers eyes to the damage on so many fronts that the gold rush, the mining, and inevitably the colonization, inflicted on the aboriginals and their land.

As with “The Death of Noah Glass” I adore Jones’ writing and must leave you with a few passages,

“It was still terrifying, a swim in the ocean. She’d never quite overcome the feeling that there was something thuggish about waves. Nell dived her best dive and came up as water broke above her. She was momentarily out of breath, dragged into a fierce undertow, rolled like a ball in turbulence and tossed and sunk, bubble-lines at her eyes like rosaries ascending in a scrim, then into surf, then into spindrift, and all of it bleary, all of it rushed, before her own bubble head emerged brimming-oh!-with panicky gasps.”

“There were the diggings, a world unmade, like a desecration, but there were also the convicts and the blacks, and the empty spaces further out, rumoured full of death. These topics too he could not fashion with words for those left in County Clare. The world was bigger here and more godless with the green gone from it and dry, and the bush a fearful wilderness beyond what was still a half made place.”

A great novel, beautifully written. 4 stars.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have appreciated all of Gail Jones work and looked forward to this, her latest. It did take me a while to engage with the novel, probably because I had just finished Ali Smith’s Summer. There could hardly be a greater contrast in style: Smith with her verve and immediacy; Jones with her quiet, thoughtful prose and sense of generational history. But the author drew me in completely as I adjusted to the rhythm of her writing.

The novel begins in Ireland in the 1850s and ends in modern day Australia with settings in the Kalgoorlie goldfields of Western Australia, Sydney and briefly in Melbourne. Its characters are the factual Paddy Hannan, discoverer of gold and founder of Kalgoorlie in the 1890s and the fictional Kelly family - Fred and Else, their daughters and granddaughters. Jones moves backwards and forwards between these characters, locations and historical periods.

As I read, I kept thinking of the book’s title and understanding more and more about how it applied to the story that Jones is telling. The shadowy world of underground mining, the shadow of unexpected wealth, shadows of grief and loss, shadows of war and of ageing. Jones also shows the dispossession of Aboriginal land as explorers and prospectors despoiled Australia’s desert landscapes. By contrast, she illuminates situations and characters as they try to move beyond the shadows of their pasts. All her characters are seen at different times of their lives and from different points of view.

An image that recurs throughout the novel is the iconic wave print of Japanese artist Hokusai. The granddaughters Frances and Nell have it on their bedroom wall in Kalgoorlie. They imagine the sea and long for it. When the story moves to Sydney, where both women now live, the surf is never far away. The ending of the book echoes this longing and the desire for reconciliation - desert and sea, the Indigenous people and their colonisers, the past and the present, family loss and family reunion.

This is a novel that is rich in ideas and delicately spare in style. I felt that Part One was stronger than Part Two (which seemed like an add on rather than an integral part of the book) but this is a minor criticism. Overall I felt rewarded in so many ways by this reading experience.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jones is a lovely writer, and this is a rich and allusive book, although I found myself uncertain about how to put all the pieces together by the end.

[Text Publishing]

The following book reviews have been shared by Text Publishing – publisher of Our Shadows

‘A beautifully written and finely imagined novel.’
Weekly Times

'Gail Jones’s new novel, Our Shadows, provides readers with another virtuoso performance, showing a writer fully in control of her medium. It is a poetic and beautifully crafted evocation of shadowy pasts whose traumatic effects (in the world and in individual lives) stretch deep into the present and the future.’
Australian Book Review

'Gail Jones deftly and sensitively brings together these disparate stories into a meditation on grief, loss, estrangement, identity and, strangely enough, mining and underground rescue. The concepts and feelings tackled here are beautifully universal, but told in a context that is uniquely Australian. Jones’s novel is an inventive blend of contemporary and historical fiction, real and imagined characters. This is required reading for anyone interested in the state of literary fiction in Australia today.’
Readings

‘When lists are made of the great novels of the Australian landscape, [Our Shadows] deserves to be among them.’
Australian

'Gail Jones is a thoughtful, accomplished writer whose work speaks for itself...Praised for her precise, incisive observations, Jones’s writing frequently offers nuanced reflections on the cultural state of Australia as well as quiet revelations about the lives of her characters. Our Shadows is no exception…written like the wave that haunts its imaginative landscape, ebbing and flowing from past generations to the present and back again.’
Guardian

‘A narrative poised between celebration and condemnation, exploring the space between individual experience and broader societal forces—between fixed historical record and a future still in formation. It is a story that balances, delicately but with intense concentration and craft, the symbolic potency of mining with an account of ordinary lives shaped by daily intimacy with the industry.’
Geordie Williamson, Saturday Paper

‘A kaleidoscopic, multi-vocal story about the ways we remember and forget the past…Expansive and intimate, intricate and richly textured, with a deep interest in the workings of memory within families as they relate to the historical legacies of people and nations.’
West Australian

'Jones’s writing is magnificent, and there are many lines in this book which hint at larger truths. It is a book to be read again and again and again.’
AU Review

'Touching on love, illness and grief, it is hauntingly beautiful.’
Good Weekend

'The braid Jones plaits here is complex, entwining fact and invention…[she] moves us back and forth across time with such confident dexterity.’
Advertiser

‘The seam in this mine-like work is deep: there are three levels for three centuries...The language is often poetic. Jones reminds us of Virginia Woolf—the same rapt receptivity. Then there are Joycean moments when Elsie dreams of Fred and their waltzing days: “The smell of him yes one two one two.” Jones writes with a suppleness that brings to mind David Malouf—a cool determination (welcome in this age of stubbornly anonymous prose) not to sound like everyone else.’
Peter Rose, Age

‘A masterwork.’
RN Bookshelf

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘So who was this old Paddy, dying in Melbourne in 1925?’

In this novel, Ms Jones explores the lives of three generations of a family living in Kalgoorlie. Her story begins with Irish-born prospector, Paddy Hannan who discovered gold in 1893, and ends with the stories of Nell and Frances who were raised by their grandparents Fred and Else when their mother Mary dies in childbirth. Fred, who suffered the horrors of war, was close to Mary and is diminished by her death.

The narrative ebbs and flows: between generations, between past and present, between life and death. Nell and Frances were close as children, both enjoyed Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ and had a favourite sentence, which they passed between them:

‘It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon.’

But as they grew older, Nell and Frances move to Sydney, and they became estranged. Frances is grieving for her husband Will who died from mesothelioma, while Nell struggles with mental health issues. And Else, central in their lives becomes diminished by dementia. And as Else recedes, Frances and Nell want to know more about their past, about the mother they never knew and the father who abandoned them. Their mother’s older sister, their Aunt Enid, is in Kalgoorlie. Does she hold some of the answers that Frances (particularly) is seeking?

Frances travels to Kalgoorlie, to Jack and Else’s home, where she grew up and where Enid now lives. It is in the (fictitious) Midas Street, close to the Super Pit. Mining overshadows everything, together with the reminder of land expropriated from the original inhabitants.

‘Enid had refashioned their lounge room in the spirit of erasure.’

I became caught up in the story, in the impact of the mines on the different characters. For Paddy, the mines were a source of wealth, for Jack they were a place of refuge from the memories of war. For many others, they were a source of death through accident or disease. And what about those who occupied the land before? As the story unfolds and refolds, our perceptions change as we see different perspectives of the characters.

I finished the novel, sure that I have only understood part of the story Ms Jones is telling. I may have to reread it. This is Ms Jones’s 9th novel. I have not yet read them all.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon"
Is certainly true of Gail Jones latest work.
A reference to Jules Verne's classic Sci-Fi work, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. It is also a shared phrase between the orphaned two youngest sisters in this slow reveal, multi-generational novel.
From Kalgoorlie, in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia to WW2 Hell Fire pass, Burma and Mines in Japan in the shadow of the Atomic Bomb Mushroom and back again, there are many shifting shadows that flicker and loom large over these characters.
Initially I was having a bit of trouble connecting to the characters but they slowly grew on me and the novel is well worth the effort. One I think I would like to read again but alas back to the library with it for now.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This had me completely enraptured until part two. Jones is a fascinating storyteller and her style draws me in with its complexity and layering. She uses repetition to slowly reveal truths and character and move the narrative forward which I love. The book takes a slightly unexpected turn in part two and it felt distinct and disconnected to the rest of the book but perhaps on later reflection will seem more integrated. I’ll always read anything Gail Jones writes.

[Lesley Moseley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 to 4 stars rounded down as the dis-jointedness , both in times and ancestry of the 3 levels of family, left me feeling like I've just finished a 1000 piece online jigsaw which I really enjoyed doing, and looked forward to putting in the last piece. NUH, not sure if there were two or three 'pieces' missing. However the parts excluding these irritations are so fantastic that I will blame it on bad proofreading and, seemingly no editor. Another favourite author , causualty of covid?

[Lorraine Lipman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn’t actually finish this book but because it was on my book club list I persevered and read half of the book. Very disappointing. Didn’t care for any of the characters, didn’t like the structure of the book and decided life is too short to persist with a dull read.

[Calzean · Rating 3 out of 5]

A family saga covering three generations. Fairly standard fare. But Gail Jones takes the reader across the gold rush that started Kalgoorlie in WA, adds an ode to Paddy Hannan who discovered the first nuggets, the impact of mental illness, life in a WW2 POW camp in Japan, the lost boys in the Thai caves, discusses a life without parents, the treatment of Aborigines, dementia, death, the painting of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" and more. Gail Jones is a gifted writer but all the various bits and pieces in the book seemed to lose some steam with Part II just limping along to its conclusion.

[Glenn Capelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a Red Dirt Kid. Kalgoorlie born. My nana ran the Main Reef Pub in Boulder. We red dirt kids are now spread far and wide and, like the sisters in this novel, are close and apart. As we age we find our way back to our heritage and our place. Our Shadows unleashed all this... sons and grandchildren of miners. Gold in our vision. Red dirt in our blood. Thank you Gail Jones.

[Caren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have long admired the fiction of Gail Jones, her magnificent descriptive writing and her creative narratives. However, this latest novel disappointed me. Jones chose to explore three generations of family living in Kalgoorie, weaving back and forth between them and the characters in her focus. However, I found this convention sometimes confusing, not allowing me to connect especially closely with any particular family or character before Jones again switched her storyline to another generation. Each of the characters was intriguing in his/her own right; each of the stories was compelling on its own. What didn't work for me was the jigsaw puzzle-like structure, made more confusing with the several poetic entries that appeared throughout the short 85 chapters.

Readers are introduced to Paddy Hannan, an Irish miner who became famous for his discovery of gold in 1893 and whose story Jones references throughout the novel. In the present, estranged sisters Frances and Nell feature as they make an effort to restore a strained relationship and acknowledge a shared, but suppressed secret. After the death of their mother when they were young children, they were raised by their grandparents (Fred and Else), whose story is also explored from the years of Fred's return from WWII. I appreciated Jones's concluding chapters on Frances herself, finally giving me the time to better understand her without jumping back to another's storyline.

Jones revealed how the "shadows" of our pasts weave their ways into and linger over our present times. She carefully places the word itself in each of the narratives, usually ending a chapter with the word subtly used. This weaving was most apparent in the sisters' lives as Frances and Nell grappled with the ghosts and echoes of their childhoods.

[Anne Fenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of all Gail Jones writes. She’s a brilliant writer whose novels often have a European aspect as well as an Australian base. This novel is firmly Australian, delving into three generations of a family. The author has family links to some of its themes, such as Irish forebears and mining. Its setting moves from Kalgoorlie to Sydney, ending in WA. The narrative moves around in time, from the historical figure of Paddy Hannan and the history of gold mining at Kalgoorlie, to modern day middle aged sisters in Sydney and their grandparents who raised them. The missing generation is the girls’ parents, they form a gap, we get glimpses but they remain lost. WW2, the Great Famine in Ireland, physical and mental health experiences all have vivid episodes woven in. There’s tragedy underlying the story, in loss, absence, silence, being alone. Memory is a key theme. It’s a powerful read, I loved it.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a bit disorientated to start with but it really drew me in and I liked how the narratives came together. An interesting story with a lot about mining in Australia which I knew nothing about.

[Tundra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gail Jones uses vivid poetic description, art and memories to conjure rhythm and repetition in the lives of three generations. The vastness of ocean juxtaposes against the arid outback mining town of Kalgoorlie. There is a sense of stories endlessly repeating as minute humans, (images of swimmers and divers) are swamped and propelled onward by enormous ceaseless waves. There is a detached melancholy - solitude - to this story about what endures in memory and the journey through grief and loss. A lovely story if you are in a contemplative mood.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this fine novel by Gail Jones but did not connect with the characters as I did in an earlier book of hers I have read titled Sorry.

Jones' nod to both recent and earlier events in world history such as the Irish Famine, the Australian Goldrushes, the atomic attacks on Japanese cities and the rescue of Thai schoolboys from an underwater cave bring interest to the novel and the links between these events become evident as the novel progresses.

I loved the references to 'scale' in the novel, the imagery is striking and thought provoking. Some examples are the giant wave Hokusai on the novel's front cover, the many descriptions of the 'Super Pit' in the Kalgoolie goldfields, the frightening depths of the ocean in the Jules Verne novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and the ephemeral salt lake, Lake Ballard in the goldfields region of Western Australia.

[Jenny · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up about a third of the way in. Just too disjointed to hold my attention. Disappointed as I have read and enjoyed many of her other books.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I was rather pleased to be wrong about this book!

I won't share my dismissive thoughts from my journal about Sixty Lights   (2004) or Dreams of Speaking (2007) by Gail Jones: suffice to say that having read two novels by this author I had decided that her style was not for me.  But because Gail Jones has so consistently been included in awards here and overseas, I went on buying her books because — although her novels do attract mixed reviews — I suspected that I was missing out on something. The TBR grew and grew, but Five Bells (2011) and A Guide to Berlin (2015) survived the occasional culls.

Released in 2020, Our Shadows has in 2021 been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize. Brona’s review at This Reading Life and Kim's at Reading Matters prompted me to read it for myself...

Set partly in Kalgoorlie WA, the novel threads through the birth of the city when gold was found there in 1893 by an Irish émigré and the fraught family history of estranged sisters Frances and Nell Kelly who were born in the 1970s.  The story begins with Paddy Hannan in Ireland and traces his decision to flee the Great Hunger and seek a better chance at survival on the Victorian goldfields.  He doesn't have much luck, either with with his marriage or with prospecting, until he sails to Fremantle, walks the 600-odd km to Kalgoorlie, and makes a lucky find.  In Chapter 3 we meet Nell and Frances in the late 1980s, bold and defiant girls on the cusp of their teenage years, for whom Paddy is nothing more than a statue on Hannan Street: there was no pioneer reverence and no point of connection.

It was hard to imagine beyond her own story.  When Frances thought of her family in this place, in Paddy Hannan's place, they seemed melodramatic, as if lodged in the wrong century.  Theirs was a tale of bad luck, the mischance of orphanhood and fate.  Nell and she had been born only eighteen months apart, and after their mother died at her birth, they were dispatched to their grandparents as a cruel compensation.  The couple wept together over the bubs and were inconsolable.  It was 1977. (p.12-13)

The sisters' bad luck extends to their father Jack abandoning them for reasons never explained and Aunt Enid's often malevolent presence in this devastated household where the girls' grandfather Fred was by then fifty-eight, sick from working in the gold mines and nightly hacking out his lungs in a shuddering growl.  His wife Else was 56.  The mine which brought wealth but not contentment to Paddy has visited silicosis on generations of working men, just as the mine at Wittenoom made Frances a young widow when her husband Will, like his father, died of mesothelioma (the asbestos disease) because he and his brother Mark played as children in the tailings.  This strand of the novel in the near present, signalled by climate change concerns, begins in Chapter 5.  The intergenerational damage done to the health of the miners is intertwined with ongoing damage to the environment, referenced by the Kalgoorlie Super Pit: until recently the largest open cut gold mine in the world at 3.5 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and over 600 metres deep.  But the resilience of the traditional owners surfaces amid the stark landscape of Lake Ballard, and also in the character of Val who is confident about her own heritage and more articulate about art than the poseurs in the gallery where Frances works in Sydney.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/10/04/o...

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is two stories in one: a fictionalized account of the life of Paddy Hannan, an Irish immigrant who discovered gold in West Australia in 1892; in the area now known as Kalgoorlie, an area still producing heaps of gold. This is interwoven with three generations of family growing up in Kalgoorlie, focusing on two sisters, Nell and Francis, who now live slightly estranged in Sydney. They lost both parents in early childhood in two separate incidents that have affected both sisters and subsequently they are brought up by their grandparents. The sisters grew up bound by reading and of fantasy. They also had a print of the famous Japanese painting Under the Wave by Katsushika Hokusai. This print was claimed by Nell, yet Francis saw great symbolism in every day life relating to this print and saw details not noticed by her older sister. Later in the book when Francis's partner has a long slow death, it sets her off on a journey of discovery back to her hometown which indirectly leads to the start of reconciliation and recovery. "It was early, sunrise. The sun wasa white ball and the moon was pale and receding. The air was alive with the garglins voices of birds...A single blade of light was now cutting a line across the road.
In this flood of brightness there was something that explained intersections lie this, of morning and memory. She heard a leaf blower start up: such an irritant contraption. Someone out there was blowing leaves from one side of a road to another, creating his own mini-cyclones in the name of garden maintenance."
Another fine work from another of my favourite Australian authors.

[Averil · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel was nominated for several awards last year. I read that it was about the Kalgoorlie gold rush and poverty in Ireland and also parts set in modern Australia and I thought great, a saga!
The structure covers multiple narratives and time periods, but is mostly set more in the second half of the 20th century through to now-ish. The portion covering Ireland and the gold rush is about real-life character and gold prospector Paddy Hannan, but is minimal and I struggled to see the relevance of his inclusion.
However, I was more interested in Paddy's story than in any of the other characters. The narration changes frequently, and I struggled to keep track of who the characters were and how they related to one another (if at all).
The key theme through the book is grief, and while I think the author did a good job of portraying different kinds of grief, and different human reactions to experiencing it, I also found it not just bleak but a little boring. There was no real light to be found, and I found myself skimming.
The other aspect of the book that grated was being whopped around the head with explained symbolism, for example: 'There was no mourning for a father, but for the idea of a father.' 'The doorknob rattled as she entered her bedroom; it stuck as it did when she was a child. Some things remained stuck; some things never changed.' Jones' writing is described by some as beautiful but I just found this too obvious. Let us, the readers, figure out what was being mourned, that the stuck door represented an unchanging life.
This just wasn't the book for me.

Please shop at your local independent bookstore.
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[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book which interweaves real life characters from history with the story of three generations of one family from Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, but while I enjoyed elements of it, overall it is not a book that will stay with me except perhaps in wondering why and what I missed. Some of the writing is wonderful, but the characters, real and imaginary, and their stories were too disjointed and I was left with too many questions. There are so many links, so many topics -from the POWs forced to work as miners in Japan, to the modern day rescue of the boys in the Thai caves, and the historical rescue of Italian born miner Modesto Varischetti in 1907. Themes and cultural references around mental illness, death/loss and the long term consequences, Hokusai's "Great Wave", migration, famine, Indigenous culture and treatment - and more. I am generally a very thoughtful reader who enjoys dissecting, thinking, exploring. I enjoy books that shift in time, are written from multiple perspectives, are presented in non traditional/non linear narratives, but this felt too disjointed and left me wanting and wondering too much.

[Susan Wishart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another wonderful book by this Australian writer. It is set mainly in Kalgoorlie spanning more than a century. It begins with young Paddy Hannan in Ireland. Along with so many of his countrymen, he voyages to Australia to escape the potato famine and try his luck prospecting for gold. A quiet, rather solitary figure, he joined two mates who made their way inland and found the first gold in Kalgoorlie. He has only a small part in this family saga played out over generations and arriving in the present day. The key characters in the story are sisters, Nell and Frances, brought up by their grandparents after the death of their mother and the absence of their father. As adults the two women marry and move to Sydney which is the setting for the latter part of the novel.
The book is very well researched and the writing is so evocative of Kalgoorlie and especially the mines. I'm sure that anyone who has lived there will enjoy this book as much as I did.

[Matt Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gail Jones is a brilliant author. My friend Virginia Gordon has lent me Five Bells which I am as yet to return (sorry VAG!), but will do so.

I bought this book in Canberra just over a year ago, familiar with the author through the book Virginia had lent me, but hadn't read to sufficient depth to understand fully her skill at writing.

She crafts a series of stories together such that there is nothing extraneous in what unfolded. As the reader, it is a wonderful device along with short chapters each over two to three pages that captures your enthusiasm to continue along the story.

Her writing is unexpectedly sensual, in wonderful ways.

A story of relationships and meaning, trying to understand legacy and purpose amidst uncertainty and loss.

Waugh is described as a brilliant author by many, and I agree with that, however I love the evocative journey Jones crafts with skill and care.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A story about three generations of family living in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, where gold was discovered in 1893 by Paddy Hannah, an Irish gold prospector.

Sisters Nell and Frances were raised by their grandparents and as children were very close sisters. Their father disappears after his wife Mary dies during Nell’s birth. Both Nell and Frances move from Kalgoorlie to Sydney, living separate lives.

Frances grieves the death of her husband. Their grandmother Else has dementia and neither sister visits Else in Kalgoorlie as Else does not recognize them. Frances travels to Kalgoorlie, hoping to find her father and meets an aboriginal woman, Enid, who was a good friend to Else. Frances learns from Enid about Frances’ family history and learns to appreciate Enid’s aboriginal way of thinking and behaving.

This book was longlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin award.

[Janine · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for The Death of Noah Glass (which I have not read), Gail Jones is often regarded as a 'literary' and 'hard' writer. I do not find her this way, but this book is probably more accessible than her other books because of its apparently familiar family-history structure. It is much more complex than that, picking up the themes of her other books - estrangement, guilt, white response to indigenous dispossession, strained relationships - explored within family bonds. Her control of the different strands and time shifts is masterful, and it is a 'meaty' book with multiple themes and reflections.

For my complete review please visit:
https://residentjudge.com/2021/05/26/...

[Cel Jel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never made the link between the earliest person to get Kalgoorlie and the next couple who were part of the story alongside their daughter and granddaughter.
The disjointed nature and jumping kept me from getting into the story to start, and then as I went along, I wanted to learn more. Mining was obviously a hard life and yet there was pride in the teams. The mix of people allowed for multiculturalism at a stage when the rest of Australia was more British in reflection of heritage.
Don't let my rating stop you considering reading this, it has merits in providing an understanding of life in a fairly desolate part of Australia.

[Bres · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first Gail Jones book and I was left cold. Her writing at times jarred with me, like I'm walking along happily and then a piece of glass enters my shoe and stops the flow, the hoped for enjoyment. For me the different stories (Paddy Hannan, the sisters) failed to connect. Symbolism may exist (and other bookclub members talked about it.... yet not convincing me) but if it was there it failed on me. I like Jones' depiction of characters but it felt there was no real story. When the indigenous relationship appeared towards the end, it felt like "ticking a box" for modern writers. I feel the book had lots of good shards of writing but that the mosaic they create fails.

[Mel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing was very strong, but I felt that this book went around in a very slow dance and had no actual purpose. I grew frustrated with the story about half way through and almost gave up. The beginning of this novel felt fresh and purposeful but then became bogged down in a slow depression. I felt that the author wanted to drag out every single feeling and thought but it never actually went anywhere. I stuck with this to see the ending, to see if it would tie up all the loose ends, but it didn't. I wish I liked it...

[Robert Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a delightful read. I was thoroughly engaged with the relationship between the two sisters framed by 3 generations of their family history. Now living in Sydney and deeply pondering their heritage after the death of their grandmother Elsie, Frances, the younger sister, decides to revisit the family home in Kalgoorlie. In doing so she is able to address some unresolved conflicts and see her family members with a different perspective, in particular her sister Nell and aunt Enid. Very satisfying indeed.