Overview

He would relive for a long time everything she said to him in the room at the mission. He would recall the way her voice had grown thicker and thicker, and how her head had begun to hang to one side from the exhaustion of her telling, and how he made himself face the photograph of the dead child... Shanghai, 1927: hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, is an anonymous expatriate treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, the wife of an Australian missionary, is sent to him for psychoanalysis, he is seduced into her world, a kaleidoscope of incestuous eroticism and grotesque hallucinations. But Ayres hides an even darker secret...

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9781922147127

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Reviews

'Marked by lush, erotic imagery and subtle, complex handling of motifs, this slim and powerful first novel from Australia is a carefully controlled psychological study.' * Publisher's Weekly * 'Utterly original...a remarkable accomplishment.' * New York Times * 'Jones should be counted amongst Australia's most interesting and talented novelists. His gift lies in his ability to write with crisp clarity about the murky and the intangible; with confidence and force about the uncertain; with detachment about passion and with passion about detachment.' * Australian Book Review *

'Jones should be counted amongst Australia's most interesting and talented novelists. His gift lies in his ability to write with crisp clarity about the murky and the intangible; with confidence and force about the uncertain; with detachment about passion and with passion about detachment.' Australian Book Review 'Utterly original...a remarkable accomplishment.' New York Times 'Marked by lush, erotic imagery and subtle, complex handling of motifs, this slim and powerful first novel from Australia is a carefully controlled psychological study.' Publisher's Weekly

Author Information

Rod Jones was born in 1953. He grew up in Melbourne and studied at the University of Melbourne. Jones’s first novel, Julia Paradise (1986), won the fiction award at the 1988 Adelaide Festival, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and was runner-up for the Prix Femina Étranger. It has been translated into ten languages and published throughout the world. Prince of the Lilies appeared in 1991 and Jones’s third novel, Billy Sunday, four years later. Billy Sunday was the 1995 Age fiction Book of the Year and won the 1996 National Book Council Award for fiction. The Boston Globe called it ‘the Great American Novel’. The follow-up, Nightpictures, was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award. Swan Bay (2003), Jones’s fifth and most recent novel, was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s and Queensland Literary Awards. All of his books are short and complex, avowedly literary and sometimes controversial. ‘We tell stories about things we can’t talk about,’ Jones has said. He has taught at various Australian institutions, including a four-year stint as a writer in residence at La Trobe University, and overseas. Rod Jones lives near Melbourne. He is working on a novel, The Mothers, to be published by Text in 2014.

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