I loved this book. The author has a gift with words. She evoked strong character portraits, vivid landscape descriptions and interesting, credible story threads. ( )

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/our-shadows-by-gail-jones/ ( )

A book passed on by a reading friend - I knew nothing of the author, or the book, or even of the genre. I think I prefer starting out cold - the recommendation of the book is enough, the details I can fill in as I read.
Well, interesting. From the cover and format I expected something light, but this book is quite cerebral. The story telling is determinedly non-linear, which is fine by me, but i struggled at the start to make sense of the characters and the time-line.
But I fell deeply into the book as I read on. It is almost totally character-driven, and rich and believable characters light up the pages.
Good stuff, and I am now listing Death of Noah Glass in my to-read list - it seems to be the author's best known and best regarded book. ( )