This moody Australian crime thriller is utterly absorbing
The Name of the Sister
Gail Jones
Text, $34.99
A new novel from award-winner Gail Jones is always a cause for celebration. The Name of the Sister is a suspenseful, sombre tale, spun with an unwavering grace, a crime thriller presented in a moody literary tone. It opens with a fleeting scene of modern tragedy shown on a television screen. A man in a war-torn country is weeping beside the ruin of his house where his family lies entombed. Soldiers appear, and it begins to snow. But it is the next news item that provides the material for the novel's main plot. Here is the story of the appearance of a mute and traumatised woman on a lonely road 30 kilometres outside Broken Hill.
Angie, a freelance journalist, is watching the screen in Sydney, and she is captivated by the image of the silent woman. Her best friend from childhood is Bev, a police officer, and they begin to discuss the case. They have always loved to go into the grim details of life, including the grief of 'dark churning thoughts' that 'turn in the night like sticky clay, like the cling of the earth itself, like the sightless underground world'.
Events unfold in Sydney and Broken Hill, both of which are vividly brought to life in the text. Two main plots are interwoven. There is the matter of the gradual failure of Angie's marriage to schoolmaster Sam, alongside her journalistic investigation of the case of the unknown woman on the road, her life 'a puzzle waiting to be solved'. Bev is at first reluctant to reveal police details of the case to Angie, but as time goes on, she cannot resist disclosure. They become more or less partners in the investigation, Bev sometimes risking her job in the process.
Many strangers claim the woman as a long-lost relative, and Angie talks to a wide range of these, taking the narrative into the dramas of many other lives. But in fact it is the life of Angie herself, and how the case has the power to influence it, that is the focus of the novel. The reader needs to know the identity of the unknown one, but at the same time is carried deep into the identity of Angie. There is a dark and terrible secret about the death of her father which she reveals to no one.
As a child, Angie was enchanted by the ancient Egyptians and their origin myth in which male ibis Thoth, born from the lips of Ra, the sun god, 'laid an egg which contained the world'. He was also, incidentally, the inventor of writing. Angie recalls this childhood fascination when Merle, a Wilyakali woman, tells her the tale of the bronze-wing pigeon, Marnpi, 'older than the Great Pyramid of Giza'. This bird was injured and came to rest on what is now known as Broken Hill, forming the shape of the land, and dropping his coloured feathers 'which became gold, silver, copper and lead'. The presence of Merle and her Indigenous wisdom breathes into the narrative a human softness and gentleness.
As part of her story on the identity of the unknown woman, Angie visits Berlin, for the life of the stranger has links to the Holocaust. The mystery is resolved and the purpose of the novel's title is finally revealed.
Between the abjection of the introductory scene on the TV screen and memories of the Holocaust, the narrative contains, as a key part of its design, Angie's participation in the bloody horror of a confrontation with an armed man in a disused Broken Hill mine.
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The Australian
26-06-2025
- The Australian
The Name of the Sister by Gail Jones book review: this is a fractious, Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of creature
In the early 2000s, I snuck into one of Gail Jones's creative writing lectures at the University of Western Australia. I was a miserable law student – in temperament and ability – and Jones was a debut novelist, or about to be. I wanted a vastly different life to the one that was expected of me, and sitting in her class was the closest I came, for a long time, to daring to admit it. Jones ended her lecture with a reading, and it felt like alchemy – to watch someone turn ideas into art. Like many clever kids, I only knew how to do the opposite. I left her classroom that day with something new, terrifying and entirely mine: permission to make something. I'm pulled back into that memory every time Jones writes a novel. There will be an image – a flourish, a cadence – that transports me back into that stolen seat, listening to her voice. In Jones's latest book, The Name of the Sister, that moment arrived on page 51 with the description of a decades-long friendship: 'Sometimes Bev and Angie, at the end of a long talk, had a drink and toasted 'constitutional seriousness', both pleased to have a friend with whom to discuss what is seldom expressed, those dark, churning thoughts that turned in the night like sticky clay, like the cling of the earth itself, like the sightless underground world, loss, poor decisions, miscarriages, grief. The way nothing fitted together. The way beauty might be convulsive. The way sadness might be pious. The command of godforsaken things to be noticed and to matter.' What a sentence: the command of godforsaken things to be noticed and to matter. If there is a unifying project to Jones's fiction – an animating force – this might be it. The Name of the Sister is Jones's 11th novel and her first whodunit. With it, she joins a growing list of Ozlit stars – Kate Mildenhall, James Bradley and Mandy Beaumont among them – who are having a crack at crime. There are plenty of ways to interpret this literary shift, from the cynical to the political to the playful. What interests me most is what these writers are doing with the conventions of the genre – or despite them. Jones's contribution is perplexing. On a lonely stretch of highway, on the outskirts of Broken Hill, a woman stumbles into the headlights of an oncoming car. She is skin and bones, the victim of prolonged captivity. Her voice box has been crushed by human hands. The woman cannot speak, or perhaps the very memory of language has been obliterated. 'No one knew who she was. No one knew where she had come from. She had simply arrived,' Jones writes. 'Her life was a puzzle waiting to be solved.' Bev and Angie – our serious friends – are caught up in that puzzle. A detective on the case, it's Bev's job to trace the unknown woman's identity. Hundreds of people believe they know her, and they have called-in from all over the country, bereft and insistent: 'She was a daughter, a lover, a runaway wife; she was the sister abducted from a playground at the age of nine; she was the teenage cousin who ran off with a stockman, on a whim or a spree, and was never seen again.' A freelance journalist, Angie is captivated by these callers and their ferocious, piteous certainty. There is a story here, she thinks, if only she can work out how to tell it. And so, as Bev narrows in on the truth, Angie listens to the families left behind. It's a wonderful premise – quiet and humane. The weight of absence. The slow agony of waiting. But The Name of the Sister is a fractious, Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of creature – a novel at war with itself. Flip through my copy and you can see that struggle play out: the first half is crowded with margin notes; moments of grace, insight, possibility. The second half is empty. My notes end when a quest begins: Angie and Bev head to Broken Hill to locate the torture site and its savage architect. We know what is coming and that is exactly what we get: an outback hellscape; a couple of hardscrabble locals with hearts of gold; a sadistic bible-mangler ('the cliche of the fictional religious madman unhinged'). The whole dusty trope-a-thon ends with a shootout in an abandoned mine shaft that reads like an outtake from Tim Winton's Juice. Here is yet another tale of lost girls in the big bad bush. A fable – and a terror – as old as the colony. It's a dispiriting narrative turn, and a mighty strange one given everything that has come before. Angie the journo is deeply ambivalent about true-crime reportage and its grisly allure – 'appalled by the public appetite for stories of hurt'. She's particularly wary of the way 'outback barbarism' is used to spice up tales of women's suffering – all that myth and menace. Yet that's the precisely the story she wanders into, like some ensorcelled mortal drawn down into the underworld ('the maw of possibilities, deep down and red'). Jones even gives us a cattle-mutt Cerberus. The Name of the Sister seems mildly disgusted with itself – apologetically indulgent (or should that be indulgently apologetic?). And that's the real mystery here. Not the lost girl, but the lost novel – the one that's been overridden, derailed and repudiated. The novel that might have made space for silence, for ambiguity, for the ache of not knowing; for the light left burning, and the empty chair at the dinner table. The novel that honoured, without spectacle, the quiet command at the heart of Jones's best work: that even godforsaken things must be noticed and made to matter. Beejay Silcox is a literary critic Arts Denis Villeneuve, a 'die-hard Bond fan' will direct the first 007 film released under Amazon's watch. Review How did a bright, churchgoing son of a country schoolteacher finish up as a literary serial killer?
Sydney Morning Herald
17-06-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
This moody Australian crime thriller is utterly absorbing
CRIME The Name of the Sister Gail Jones Text, $34.99 A new novel from award-winner Gail Jones is always a cause for celebration. The Name of the Sister is a suspenseful, sombre tale, spun with an unwavering grace, a crime thriller presented in a moody literary tone. It opens with a fleeting scene of modern tragedy shown on a television screen. A man in a war-torn country is weeping beside the ruin of his house where his family lies entombed. Soldiers appear, and it begins to snow. But it is the next news item that provides the material for the novel's main plot. Here is the story of the appearance of a mute and traumatised woman on a lonely road 30 kilometres outside Broken Hill. Angie, a freelance journalist, is watching the screen in Sydney, and she is captivated by the image of the silent woman. Her best friend from childhood is Bev, a police officer, and they begin to discuss the case. They have always loved to go into the grim details of life, including the grief of 'dark churning thoughts' that 'turn in the night like sticky clay, like the cling of the earth itself, like the sightless underground world'. Events unfold in Sydney and Broken Hill, both of which are vividly brought to life in the text. Two main plots are interwoven. There is the matter of the gradual failure of Angie's marriage to schoolmaster Sam, alongside her journalistic investigation of the case of the unknown woman on the road, her life 'a puzzle waiting to be solved'. Bev is at first reluctant to reveal police details of the case to Angie, but as time goes on, she cannot resist disclosure. They become more or less partners in the investigation, Bev sometimes risking her job in the process. Many strangers claim the woman as a long-lost relative, and Angie talks to a wide range of these, taking the narrative into the dramas of many other lives. But in fact it is the life of Angie herself, and how the case has the power to influence it, that is the focus of the novel. The reader needs to know the identity of the unknown one, but at the same time is carried deep into the identity of Angie. There is a dark and terrible secret about the death of her father which she reveals to no one. As a child, Angie was enchanted by the ancient Egyptians and their origin myth in which male ibis Thoth, born from the lips of Ra, the sun god, 'laid an egg which contained the world'. He was also, incidentally, the inventor of writing. Angie recalls this childhood fascination when Merle, a Wilyakali woman, tells her the tale of the bronze-wing pigeon, Marnpi, 'older than the Great Pyramid of Giza'. This bird was injured and came to rest on what is now known as Broken Hill, forming the shape of the land, and dropping his coloured feathers 'which became gold, silver, copper and lead'. The presence of Merle and her Indigenous wisdom breathes into the narrative a human softness and gentleness. As part of her story on the identity of the unknown woman, Angie visits Berlin, for the life of the stranger has links to the Holocaust. The mystery is resolved and the purpose of the novel's title is finally revealed. Between the abjection of the introductory scene on the TV screen and memories of the Holocaust, the narrative contains, as a key part of its design, Angie's participation in the bloody horror of a confrontation with an armed man in a disused Broken Hill mine.
The Age
17-06-2025
- The Age
This moody Australian crime thriller is utterly absorbing
CRIME The Name of the Sister Gail Jones Text, $34.99 A new novel from award-winner Gail Jones is always a cause for celebration. The Name of the Sister is a suspenseful, sombre tale, spun with an unwavering grace, a crime thriller presented in a moody literary tone. It opens with a fleeting scene of modern tragedy shown on a television screen. A man in a war-torn country is weeping beside the ruin of his house where his family lies entombed. Soldiers appear, and it begins to snow. But it is the next news item that provides the material for the novel's main plot. Here is the story of the appearance of a mute and traumatised woman on a lonely road 30 kilometres outside Broken Hill. Angie, a freelance journalist, is watching the screen in Sydney, and she is captivated by the image of the silent woman. Her best friend from childhood is Bev, a police officer, and they begin to discuss the case. They have always loved to go into the grim details of life, including the grief of 'dark churning thoughts' that 'turn in the night like sticky clay, like the cling of the earth itself, like the sightless underground world'. Events unfold in Sydney and Broken Hill, both of which are vividly brought to life in the text. Two main plots are interwoven. There is the matter of the gradual failure of Angie's marriage to schoolmaster Sam, alongside her journalistic investigation of the case of the unknown woman on the road, her life 'a puzzle waiting to be solved'. Bev is at first reluctant to reveal police details of the case to Angie, but as time goes on, she cannot resist disclosure. They become more or less partners in the investigation, Bev sometimes risking her job in the process. Many strangers claim the woman as a long-lost relative, and Angie talks to a wide range of these, taking the narrative into the dramas of many other lives. But in fact it is the life of Angie herself, and how the case has the power to influence it, that is the focus of the novel. The reader needs to know the identity of the unknown one, but at the same time is carried deep into the identity of Angie. There is a dark and terrible secret about the death of her father which she reveals to no one. As a child, Angie was enchanted by the ancient Egyptians and their origin myth in which male ibis Thoth, born from the lips of Ra, the sun god, 'laid an egg which contained the world'. He was also, incidentally, the inventor of writing. Angie recalls this childhood fascination when Merle, a Wilyakali woman, tells her the tale of the bronze-wing pigeon, Marnpi, 'older than the Great Pyramid of Giza'. This bird was injured and came to rest on what is now known as Broken Hill, forming the shape of the land, and dropping his coloured feathers 'which became gold, silver, copper and lead'. The presence of Merle and her Indigenous wisdom breathes into the narrative a human softness and gentleness. As part of her story on the identity of the unknown woman, Angie visits Berlin, for the life of the stranger has links to the Holocaust. The mystery is resolved and the purpose of the novel's title is finally revealed. Between the abjection of the introductory scene on the TV screen and memories of the Holocaust, the narrative contains, as a key part of its design, Angie's participation in the bloody horror of a confrontation with an armed man in a disused Broken Hill mine.
