AustLit

'In all of Gail Jones’s writing, words bump up against images from art and cinema – visual keys to convey what narrative may not. Her working-class childhood in rural and remote Western Australia had offered little in the way of literature, but visually there was much to fire her imagination. She remembers the pearl-diving industry of coastal Broome, especially the mother shells that shone like moonlight.' (Introduction)

'Noah Glass is dead, his fully clothed body discovered floating face down in the swimming pool of his Sydney apartment block, early one morning. Born in Perth in 1946, father of two adult children, widower, Christian, art historian, and specialist in the painting of fifteenth-century artist Piero della Francesca, Noah has just returned from a trip to Palermo. There he celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday, experienced intimations of mortality, fell precipitately in love, and agreed, for the sake of the beloved, to commit a crime. Even before the funeral, the police are in touch with Noah’s son: a valuable work of art has been stolen and Noah is implicated in its disappearance.' (Introduction)

'Australian novelist Gail Jones is no great spinner of yarns or master of mood and atmosphere, but she does have a unique feeling for the fascinations of the fragmentary. Her books brim with literary allusions, historical anecdotes, references to scholarly oddities and intriguing quotations, and when all else fails she can always charm with the glitter of so many carefully arranged details and luminous curiosities.'  (Introduction)

'In Gail Jones’ 2018 novel about the life and death of Noah Glass, his ‘vocation’ as an art historian begins when, as a small boy growing up in the remote north of Western Australia, he opens a book about the Great Art Museums of the World. It translates him miraculously from the Mars-orange landscape of the outback to the rarefied, Prussian-blue world of Piero della Francesca: it was a ‘window to elsewhere’ and ‘other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages’. The significance of this moment is confirmed twenty years later when, as a student in London, Noah discovers Piero’s The Nativity (c. 1470-5) hanging in the National Gallery: ‘Noah walked around the National Gallery, taking meticulous notes, registering line by line his self-improvement’. These are instances of what Peter Wagner calls intermediality: the intertextual use of one medium, such as painting, in another medium, such as prose fiction.' (Introduction)

'Gail Jones is an academic and novelist currently based in the Society and Writing Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She often depicts a world that stretches continents and references other cultural forms, from cinema, to music, to visual art. Jones has been the winner of the Colin Roderick Award and Nita Kibble Award, and was long-listed for the Orange, Man Booker, and Prix Femina Etranger. We caught up to speak about her new novel, The Death of Noah Glass, which was released by Text Publishing on April 2nd.'

Source: Magazine blurb.