Cirrus@Austlit

'In 2022, Gail Jones published Salonika Burning, set during the First World War, her ninth novel and the latest entry in an impressive body of literary work. Jones began her professional life as an academic, first at Edith Cowan University and then at the University of Western Australia, and her first two works of short fiction, The House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997), as well as her first novel, Black Mirror (2002), are notable for their experimental integration of critical theory, feminism, and innovative reinterpretations of canonical texts. It was Jones's subsequent novels—Sixty Lights (2004), Dreams of Speaking (2006), Sorry (2007), and Five Bells (2011)—with a new focus on the historical and national issues of Australia's colonial legacy that established her as a major author. This status has been cemented by the publication of two recent academic studies of her work: Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics (2020), by Tanya Dalziell, and Inner and Outer Worlds: Gail Jones' Fiction (2022), edited by Anthony Uhlmann.' (Introduction)