Literary + Crime: The Name of the Sister’ by Gail Jones

This very Australian novel is best described as ‘literary crime’. Crime, in that there is a crime that is central to the story line: why things in the novel play out the way they do. Literary, in the sense of its beautiful prose and the strong focus on character and theme.

The plot concerns Angie, a disillusioned journalist who is trying to make a career from freelance work. Her husband Sam is a teacher, also somewhat jaded in his chosen career. The third main character is Angie’s childhood friend Beverley, now a senior detective in the NSW Police. The three individuals and their interactions form the core of the story, around their own concerns and preoccupations and the novel’s crime.

So, to the crime. A young woman is found on a deserted road one night, near the mining town of Broken Hill in outback NSW. She can’t speak, has no ID and no one knows who she is. She becomes Unknown Woman, then given the moniker Jane.

As you might expect, the media and online social platforms are full of rumours, speculation and theories about who ‘Jane’ really is and what happened to her.

Angie is herself drawn to the story and thanks to her connection with Bev, ends up fielding calls from among the many people who contact the Police information line, certain that ‘Jane’ is their missing daughter, friend, or sister. Despite her misgivings, Angie becomes a sounding board, a witness to the loss and grief that these people have carried for months or years. It starts to become a heavy burden but she feels unable to stop.

She bears her own burdens, including her inability to have a child, and the grief of her slow realisation that her marriage was failing, her previously uncomplicated relationship with Sam becoming distant and unsatisfying. She knows that Marriages of a decade were destroyed by less: this gloom of worn expectations, this failure wholly to connect. (p21) Worse still, she doesn’t know what to do about it.

Then a family arrive from Germany to identify the Unknown Woman as their daughter who’d gone missing a couple of years earlier on a holiday in Australia. ‘Jane’ is Hannah Bloch; the mystery of her identity solved but not what had happened to her.

As Bev goes to Broken Hill to work on the case, Angie decides to join her there in the hope of…what? Distraction from her own problems? That she might have something to contribute to the police investigation? She’s not really sure.

It’s in Broken Hill that the novel’s climax takes place, a resolution of the mystery at the heart of the novel, and a revelation of the (very clever) meaning of the title.

Jones’s writing is beautiful, deftly capturing the various landscapes of inner-suburban Sydney and outback Broken Hill, along with relationships in all their wonderful supportiveness and messiness:

When Bev and Angie next met it was at Bev’s apartment, for a pizza.
Girls’ night, Bev called it; both needed to talk. They were alike in wanting the other to confirm what Angie called constitutional seriousness, how they had seen in each other – perhaps from the beginning, and certainly before they had words for it – the ability to not look away, to search for deeper meanings, to take themselves seriously.
The Name of the Sister p50-51

The Name of the Sister was published in 2025 by Text Publishing.