AustLit

'The protagonist of Gail Jones’s One Another accidentally leaves the manuscript of the book she is writing on a train. Helen is a PhD student from Tasmania who is living in Cambridge while she researches and writes a thesis on Joseph Conrad, the Ukrainian-born mariner and writer who eventually settled in England. Neither a conventional scholarly account of Conrad’s work nor a true biography, the manuscript slips away from Helen’s possession just as it slips from the moorings of conventional categories of form.' (Introduction)

'Jones’s latest novel is complex and delicate, charting echoes in the lives of a PhD student in 90s Cambridge and the Heart of Darkness author, who she is fascinated by.'

'It is 1992, the year of the Mabo judgment, and Helen, a scholarship student from Tasmania, is undertaking a PhD at Cambridge, writing a thesis titled ‘Cryptomodernism and Empire’. It is on Joseph Conrad, a writer about whom her peers are contemptuous. Helen is dealing with a forlorn and dismissive supervisor, and the disappointment that her experience abroad was not what she had expected. Her ‘fantasy of vigorous literary talk, multisyllabic and theoretical, was soon defeated’.' (Introduction)