This original, dazzling and wide-ranging collection of short stories from acclaimed author Gail Jones takes the reader around the world and covers topics ranging from poetry, to Freud, to the Titanic.'Jones's (Fetish Lives) tales could be read for the sheer enjoyment of her unusual, eclectic subject matter and her poetic technique. Yet the very precision of her language and her brilliantly expressive imagery encourage the reader to consider the deeper meanings of the text.' — Publishers Weekly, USIn 1991, The House of Breathing won the T.A.G. Hungerford Award, and was published in 1992 to immediate acclaim, winning the Western Australian Premier's Fiction Award, the Steele Rudd Award, and the Barbara Ramsden Award. Described in the UK's Daily Telegraph as 'a novelist who deserves to be celebrated', Gail Jones's work has been critically acclaimed, widely translated, and won multiple awards including The Age Book of the Year, the...

Greece, 1917. The great city of Salonika is engulfed by fire as all of Europe is ravaged by war.Amid the destruction, there are those who have come to the frontlines to heal: surgeons, ambulance drivers, nurses, orderlies and other volunteers. Four of them—Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley—are at the centre of Gail Jones's extraordinary new novel, which takes its inspiration from the wartime experiences of Australians Miles Franklin and Olive King, and British painters Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In Jones's imagination these four lives intertwine and change, each compelled by the desire to create something meaningful in the ruins of a broken world.Immersive and gripping, Salonika Burning illuminates not only the devastation of war but also the vast social upheaval of the times. It shows Gail Jones to be at the height of her powers.Gail Jones is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. She is the author of two short-story...

Our Shadows is a story about 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.Nell and Frances are sisters who are close enough in age to be mistaken for twins. Raised by their grandparents, they now live in Sydney. 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.Gail Jones is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and shortlisted for the IMPAC Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. The Death of...

At Cambridge, in the summer of 1992, Australian student Helen is completing her thesis on Joseph Conrad. But she is distracted by a charming and dangerous lover, Justin, and by a ghost manuscript, her anti-thesis, which she has left on a train.Haunted by this loss and others, by Justin's destructive tendencies and by details of Conrad's life, Helen is unmoored. And then the drama of the lost manuscript sets in motion a series of events—with possibly fatal consequences.Gail Jones's masterly new novel traverses the borders between art and life, between life and death, in a journey through literary history and emotional landscapes. Elegantly written, deftly crafted, One Another covers new territories of grief, memory and narrative.Gail Jones is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. She is the author of two short-story collections and nine novels, and her work has been translated into several languages and has received numerous literary...

Shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and Longlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize. 'A Guide to Berlin' is the name of a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1925, when he was a young man of 26, living in Berlin. A group of six international travellers, two Italians, two Japanese, an American and an Australian, meet in empty apartments in Berlin to share stories and memories. Each is enthralled in some way to the work of Vladimir Nabokov, and each is finding their way in deep winter in a haunted city. A moment of devastating violence shatters the group, and changes the direction of everyone's story. Brave and brilliant, A Guide to Berlin traces the strength and fragility of our connections through biographies and secrets.

A vision of Japan as you have never imagined it. A brilliant and moving novel about displacement and belonging by the award-winning author of Sixty Lights and Five Bells. She wished to study the unremarked beauty of modern things, of telephones, aeroplanes, computer screens and electric lights, of television, cars and underground transportation. There had to be in the world of mechanical efficiency some mystery of transaction, the summoning of remote meanings, an extra dimension - supernatural, sure. There had to be a lost sublimity, of something once strange, now familiar, tame.''We must talk, Alice Black, about this world of modern things. This buzzing world." Alice is entranced by the aesthetics of technology and, in every aeroplane flight, every Xerox machine, every neon sign, sees the poetry of modernity. Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the atomic bomb, is an expert on Alexander Graham Bell. Like Alice, he is culturally and geographically displaced. The pair forge an unlikely...

A Picador Paperback Original On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water. But just as Circular Quay resonates with Australia's past, each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere. Each person is haunted by past secrets and guilt. Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her beloved brother in Dublin, and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China's Cultural Revolution. Told over the course of a single Saturday, Five Bells describes four lives that come to share not only a place and a time but also mysterious patterns and ambiguous symbols, including a barely glimpsed fifth figure, a young child. By...

Sixty Lights is the captivating chronicle of Lucy Strange, an independent girl growing up in the Victorian world. From her childhood in Australia through to her adolescence in England and Bombay and finally to London, Lucy is fascinated by light and by the new photographic technology. Her perception of the world is passionate and moving, revealed in a series of frozen images captured in the camera of her mind's eye showing her feelings about love, life and loss. In this confident, finely woven and intricate novel Jones has created an unforgettable character in Lucy; visionary, gifted and exuberant, she touches the lives of all who know her.

?I am waiting for this visitor so that I can tell my story and die.? The award-winning novel from Gail JonesVictoria Morrell was once a great artist. She led the high life - living and working in Paris, mixing with the artists of the Surrealist movement. Her work was largely forgotten in the fifties and sixties, but was rediscovered in the seventies when she became something of a cult figure on the London art scene. She now lives as a recluse in Hampstead, London. And she is dying. Anna Griffin is the young woman commissioned to write a biography of Victoria's life. In many ways their lives strangely intersect, since they grew up in the same mining town and share preoccupations with underground spaces, deserts and the many forms of grief. In a compelling double narrative, Gail Jones tracks Victoria's past as it intertwines with Anna's life. The stories Victoria tells enable both women to enter into new forms of sympathy and understanding. Elegant, enthralling, and...

The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block. His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father's death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. The police are investigating.None of it makes any sense. Martin sets off to Palermo in search of answers about his father's activities, while Evie moves into Noah's apartment, waiting to learn where her life might take her. Retracing their father's steps in their own way, neither of his children can see the path ahead.Gail Jones's mesmerising new novel tells a story about parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns that life makes. The Death of Noah Glass is about love and art, about grief and happiness, about memory and the mystery of time.The author of seven novels and two collections of...

This is a story that can only be told in a whisper ... In the remote outback of Western Australia during the Second World War, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education. Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives. Through this exquisite story of Perdita's troubled childhood, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a brilliance that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels, Dreams of Speaking and Sixty Lights.