Sixty Lights [Hardcover]

"'Breathtaking grace and immense skill...engaging, beautiful, magical and compelling' Irish Times" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Breathtaking grace and immense skill-engaging, beautiful, magical and compelling' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Breathtaking grace and immense skill-engaging, beautiful, magical and compelling' Irish Times --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

"Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall..." This is the story of Lucy Strange, a photographer, while the art is in its infancy, in the 1870s, who exists in an extraordinarily heightened state of seeing and imagining. Her tale is told in sixty illuminated parts - using candlelight, flames, lightning, gas-lamps, mirrors, magic lanterns and, most mysteriously, lit faces and bodies. In a contracted, almost modernist form, Sixty Lights tracks Lucy's life from her childhood in Australia, to her stormy adolescence in England and India and finally to her death in London at the age of twenty-three. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished: she is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted, passionate and canny. Sixty Lights plays powerfully with Victorian tropes and texts - orphans, inheritances, Great Expectations - setting them against the technological revolution in seeing that is inspired by photography. Written with astute imagistic precision, the story is deeply layered, fluctuating between past, present and future. This is an impressive UK debut from a prize-winning

Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall

Gail Jones teaches in the department of English, Communications and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of short stories and one previous novel which have been published in Australia and for which she has won numerous awards.

A VOICE IN THE DARK: "LUCY?"

It was a humid-sounding whisper. She wanted this, this muffled gentleness, swathed in sheets scented and moistened by the heated conjoining of their bodies. This tropic of the bed. This condensation of herself into the folds of a marriage. The late night air was completely still. Insects struck at the mosquito net, which fell, silver and conical, like a bridal garment around them. Lucy watched a pale spotted moth sail slowly towards her face, land on the net, deposit its powder, and lift unevenly away. It was waving like a tiny baby hand in the darkness.

This is what she had seen, earlier that day: An Indian man had been climbing the bamboo scaffolding of one of the high colonial buildings, with a large mirror bound to his body by a piece of cloth. His white dhoti was flapping and his orange turban was atilt, and he hauled himself with confidence from level to precarious level - altogether a fellow who knew what he was doing - when some particular gust or alarum that carried the dimension of fate caused him to misjudge his footing and fall through the air. Because he could not release the mirror, but clutched at it as though it was a magic carpet, he landed in the midst of its utter shattering, and was speared through the chest. The quantity of blood was astounding. It spurted everywhere. But what Lucy noticed most - when she rushed close to offer assistance along with everyone else - was that the mirror continued its shiny business: its jagged shapes still held the world it existed in, and bits and pieces of sliced India still glanced on its surface. Tiny shocked faces lined along the spear, compressed there, contained, assembled as if for a lens. She simply could not help herself: she thought of a photograph.

And only later, in deep night, did Lucy rise in distress. She found herself bolt upright, staring at the darkness, and seeing before her this man who was horribly killed. He had died quickly, she supposed, because his black eyes were fixed open and his mouth was mutely agape, but there he was, halted in time. She saw the elements only now: the shade of the tamarind tree into which he fell, the lifting of startled crows in a flapping explosion, a woman who stood with her blue sari spattered bright red, the children who hurried forward to gather fragments of mirror, Bashanti, her servant, weeping into her dupatta. The community of the accident. The gory congregation. Two men appeared with sackcloth to carry away the body in a sling. Lucy remembered stepping backwards when she realised that blood was soaking her satin-covered boots, and seeing her own miniaturised face retreat and disappear.

In bed the man beside her turned over, half-awake. His dark humped shape set the mosquito net aquiver.

"Lucy?" he enquired again.

He sounded almost loving.

She will remember this utterance of her name when she meets her own death - in a few years' time, at the age of twenty-two. It will signify the gentleness that briefly existed between them. For now, however, she senses the baby stir within her, aroused by her night terror and her pounding pulse, and feels entirely alone. She is stranded in this anachronistic moment she can tell no-one about, this moment that greets her with the blinding flash of a burnt magnesium ribbon. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.