'Grouping sets of novels and stories to elucidate the functions of key tropes in Jones’s fiction, Dalziell covers the writer’s entire output up to 2020. With recourse to the novelist’s essays and interviews, chapters provide close readings of weather, time, reading and writing, image and modernity. The interest overall is to show how unstable oscillations in the stories serve to express an idea of ethical relations as tentative constructions of community aware of their limitations, both in life and literature.' (Publication abstract)