Review by Freya Bennett
This was my first experience reading Gail Jones, and now I’m wondering how I’ve gone so long without her. It’s always exciting discovering an author whose writing feels so different from anything you’ve read before—and Jones’ style is exactly that. Her prose is smart, lyrical, and inventive. At times, almost too smart for me—there were moments where unfamiliar words pulled me out of the story, though I did enjoy the challenge of learning them.
When a young woman appears on an outback road at night, caught in the headlights of an approaching car, she instantly becomes a public interest. She cannot speak, and no one knows who she is. But everyone wants to know her. Angie, a freelance journalist, fascinated by the case, uses her connection to Bev—her childhood friend and the police officer in charge of the case—to dig deeper into the woman’s identity.
Set between urban Sydney and the Mars-red landscapes around Broken Hill, The Name of the Sister is both a literary thriller and a meditation on identity, memory, and the slippery nature of truth. It lingers in the space between fact and fiction, asking how we construct meaning from the stories we tell.
Admittedly, I was first drawn to the book by its beautiful cover, designed by WH Chong (I do judge books by their covers), but what a joy it is to have discovered an author with such a rich backlist. I’ll be working my way through the rest of Gail Jones’s work—and savouring every word.
