'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.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph :
'Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what's come upon is manifest
Only in light of what has been gone through.'
Seamus Heaney ('Squarings xlviii')
'In Gail Jones’ debut novel Black Mirror (2002), young Australian biographer Anna travels to London to meet Victoria Morrell, who in the 1930s fled a Western Australian gold-mining town for Paris, where she became an artist at the fringes of the surrealist movement. Interviewing her flamboyant subject, Anna discovers that Morrell’s extravagance conceals a deep shame that her father, owner of the local Midas mine, was violently racist. His fondness for proudly comparing the depth of his mine to the inferior height of the Eiffel Tower makes her flight to Paris symbolic, more than the act of a provincial putting on airs. Positioning art as a repudiation of the corrupting colonial logic of plunder, Anna celebrates Morrell as a ‘Prospector of the Marvellous’.' (Introduction)
'Our Shadows by Gail Jones is a family saga that examines the intimate lives of three generations living in Kalgoorlie. The story starts with Paddy Hannan, an Irish-born prospector who discovered gold back in 1893. Paddy’s history is woven in and out of the text and we travel back and forth between his story. We also meet sisters Nell and Frances, and grandparents, Fred and Else. The relationships drawn out in this novel are complex and layered, unfolding slowly as you read. There’s no doubt that Jones is a beautiful writer, precise, perceptive, and full of razor-sharp observations.' (Introduction)
'In the winter of 1893, the Irish prospector Paddy Hannan and two compatriots noted the presence of gold in the place that would become known as Kalgoorlie. The diggings were soon swarmed, and a bustling mining town grew up in the years that followed, the magnetic pull of precious metal overcoming the remoteness of the Western Australian site, the aridity of its climate, the inherent dangers of the work.' (Introduction)
'Three generations of a gold-mining family search for meaning in a carefully rendered ninth novel from last year’s Prime Minister’s literary award-winner.'
'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.'
'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.'
'Three generations of a gold-mining family search for meaning in a carefully rendered ninth novel from last year’s Prime Minister’s literary award-winner.'
'In the winter of 1893, the Irish prospector Paddy Hannan and two compatriots noted the presence of gold in the place that would become known as Kalgoorlie. The diggings were soon swarmed, and a bustling mining town grew up in the years that followed, the magnetic pull of precious metal overcoming the remoteness of the Western Australian site, the aridity of its climate, the inherent dangers of the work.' (Introduction)
'Our Shadows by Gail Jones is a family saga that examines the intimate lives of three generations living in Kalgoorlie. The story starts with Paddy Hannan, an Irish-born prospector who discovered gold back in 1893. Paddy’s history is woven in and out of the text and we travel back and forth between his story. We also meet sisters Nell and Frances, and grandparents, Fred and Else. The relationships drawn out in this novel are complex and layered, unfolding slowly as you read. There’s no doubt that Jones is a beautiful writer, precise, perceptive, and full of razor-sharp observations.' (Introduction)
