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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.
Set in Kalgoorlie and Sydney, the novel’s focus on mining provides both historical context for the present-day narration and a complex metaphor of dispossession and despoiling on the one hand, and ‘discovery’ and ‘luck’ on the other.
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