Five Bells

Editorial Reviews

"Jones paints the connections that bind us, the power of place, and the random encounters that can change the course of our lives. An elegant literary meditation on time and chance." - Publisher's Weekly

"Gail Jones is already recognised as one of the best novelists at work in Australia. Everything about her new fiction, Five Bells, from the evocative title to a cover image of Circular Quay painted in tinted steam, speaks of thrillingly expanded ambition. Describing one day in the lives of four different visitors to the tourist hub and historical Omphalos of European Australia, Jones sets out to reimagine Kenneth Slessor's great poem for the present, using a combination of steely intelligence and delicate prose." - Geordie Williamson, The Australian

"Thoughtful, intelligent and intensely lyrical." - Jem Poster, The Guardian

"This is a story peopled by achingly real characters, memorably related in delicate, ornate prose, and throbbing with loss. Death comes to claim us all, it seems to say, so enjoy the transient glory of life while you can." - The Independent

"Five Bells is a taut, intricately organised short novel that yet gives the impression of expansiveness. It moves with the confidence and mastery that marks Jones as one of the most distinguished of a vintage bunch of contemporary novelists." - Peter Pierce, The Sydney Morning Herald

"Jones is one of our greatest writers. For her enormous wisdom and insight as well as the shimmering intensity of her descriptive language." - Alice Nelson, The West Australian

"Long after finishing Five Bells, I am still thinking about the lives of these four characters, the pasts that haunt them and the different directions they embark on at the novel's brilliant ending." - Fiona McGregor

"A luminous, finely crafted, sometimes jubilant, sometimes sad novel about time and art, history and loss, resilience and redemption, it is, as we have come to expect from Gail Jones as beguiling as it is provocative. A novel that reaches beyond the glittering surface of Sydney, to capture the rippling patterns of a wider human history with singular beauty and power." - Bron Sibree, The Canberra Times

"Five Bells is a brilliant work, both explicitly Australian and insistently cosmopolitan. This new novel establishes Gail Jones as one of Australia's finest authors. She strives for moments when words draw pause; throughout Five Bells this is her magnificent achievement. In the midst of pandemonium, traffic and tourist hordes gazing at icons, Jones gives us individuals who are achingly alive, filled with apprehensions of beauty, love and mortality." - Stella Clarke, The Australian

"This is, quite simply, a beautiful book. Slessor's Five Bells is justly claimed as an elegy of enormous power, about place and its spirit. Memory, the sense of loss, and the painful connection between past and present are so brilliantly and immediately brought to life in Gail Jones's Five Bells that it deserves to share the illustrious title." - David Gaunt, Australian Bookseller + Publisher