‘I am waiting for this visitor so that I can tell my story and die.’ The award-winning novel from Gail Jones

‘I am waiting for this visitor so that I can tell my story and die.’ The award-winning novel from Gail Jones

Victoria Morrell was once a great artist. She led the high life - living and working in Paris, mixing with the artists of the Surrealist movement. Her work was largely forgotten in the fifties and sixties, but was rediscovered in the seventies when she became something of a cult figure on the London art scene. She now lives as a recluse in Hampstead, London. And she is dying.

Anna Griffin is the young woman commissioned to write a biography of Victoria’s life. In many ways their lives strangely intersect, since they grew up in the same mining town and share preoccupations with underground spaces, deserts and the many forms of grief. In a compelling double narrative, Gail Jones tracks Victoria’s past as it intertwines with Anna’s life.

The stories Victoria tells enable both women to enter into new forms of sympathy and understanding. Elegant, enthralling, and emotionally charged, Black Mirror is both a novel of love and family mystery, and a meditation on the nature of artistic vision and obsession.