Ponderance: <i>Sixty Lights</i> Booker Nomination!

Sixty Lights Booker Nomination!

Saturday, August 28, 2004

A huge and deserved congratulations to Gail Jones who has been nominated for the 2004 Booker Prize for her new novel Sixty Lights. Gail, who also teaches in English, Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, is an accomplished and renowned writer as well as being a fantastic and inspirational educator. Even thought Sixty Lights is not officially released until September 2nd, the novel has already received very encouraging reviews, including James Bradley in The Age who argues the novel offers "an extended meditation on photography that takes its haunting power and weaves it back into a story that reminds us of the ways in which those things that make us most human - love, story, forgiveness - are themselves inseparable from our mortality." The official page for Sixty Lights at Harvill (an imprint of Random House) describes the new novel thus:

In 1860, when they are just eight and ten, Lucy Strange and her brother Thomas are orphaned. Left now in the care of their uncle, the children begin slowly, frighteningly, to find their place in the difficult world. And so begins Lucy's adolescent journey of discovery, one which will take her away from her childhood home in Australia, first to London, then to Bombay and, finally, to her death, at the age of twenty-three. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished. Lucy is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted and exuberant; she touches the lives of all who know her. Written in confident, finely interwoven and intricate layers, Sixty Lights is the powerful chronicle of a modern and independent young woman's life in the Victorian world. Objects evoke memories and hint at the future in a narrative that flows between pleats in time.

Through her observation of such objects Lucy's photographic vision is apparent. Her world is a series of still images which one day, printed on albumen paper, she will leave as affecting mementoes of her own extraordinary life.

Having thoroughly enjoyed Gail's previous interweaving of ideas of subjectivity with the specifities of certain representational media, I must admit, I'll be out finding a copy as soon as Sixty Lights hits the shelves! (To order Sixty Lights check any decent bookshop after Sept 2nd or click here.)

The shortlist for the Booker is announced on 21 September, and the winner announced, as the official website tells us, "at an awards ceremony in the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster, London and will be broadcast live on BBC TWO and BBC FOUR".

Of Further Interest
Gail Jones