AustLit

'Salonika Burning, the ninth novel from Gail Jones, is an enthralling narrative that transports readers to the battlefields of Greece in 1917. Jones, whose book The Death of Noah Glass won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2019, is one of Australia’s most distinguished and highly awarded writers. This latest novel, like much of her work, brings the settings and dramas of the past into sharp and vivid focus.' (Introduction)   

'In 1917, at the height of World War I, a fire destroyed the Greek city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), a staging post for Allied troops. The centre of an ‘Ottoman polyglot culture’, Salonika was at the time home to large numbers of refugees, many of them Jewish and Roma. It was in one of the refugee hovels that the fire started, an ember from a makeshift stove igniting a bundle of straw. From that single ember grew an inferno that burned for thirty-two hours, obliterating three-quarters of the city and leaving 70,000 people – by some estimates half the population – homeless.' (Introduction)