Nell and Frances Kelly are raised by their grandparents after their mother dies in labour and their father abandons them in a fit of grief. The sisters grow up with a special bond cemented by a shared language, a love of stories and a mutual fascination with Hokusai’s The Great Wave. This closeness dissipates in adulthood as they individually struggle with the legacy of their orphanhood and the loss of their grandparents. Following the death of her husband, Frances becomes determined to excavate the past and travels home to Kalgoorlie in search of answers.

Our Shadows largely focuses on the stories of these three generations of the Kelly family: Fred and Else, their daughters Mary and Enid, and Mary’s daughters, Nell and Frances. Woven into their stories is the tale of real-life miner Paddy Hannan, the man responsible for discovering gold in the West Australian goldfields. The novel moves between nineteenth century Ireland and the Australian goldfields; mid-twentieth century Australia and World War II battle sites; and contemporary Sydney, Melbourne, and Kalgoorlie.

This might sound like quite a lot to fit into one 300-page novel, but Gail Jones deftly and sensitively brings together these disparate stories into a meditation on grief, loss, estrangement, identity and, strangely enough, mining and underground rescue. The concepts and feelings tackled here are beautifully universal, but told in a context that is uniquely Australian. Jones’s novel is an inventive blend of contemporary and historical fiction, real and imagined characters. This is required reading for anyone interested in the state of literary fiction in Australia today.

Tristen Brudy works as a bookseller at Readings Carlton.