Julia Paradise

He would relive for a long time everything she said to him in the room at the mission. He would recall the way her voice had grown thicker and thicker, and how her head had begun to hang to one side from the exhaustion of her telling, and how he made himself face the photograph of the dead child...Shanghai, 1927: hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, is an anonymous expatriate treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, the wife of an Australian missionary, is sent to him for psychoanalysis, he is seduced into her world, a kaleidoscope of incestuous eroticism and grotesque hallucinations. But Ayres hides an even darker secret...

About the Author

Rod Jones was born in 1953. He grew up in Melbourne and studied at the University of Melbourne. Jones's first novel, Julia Paradise (1986), won the fiction award at the 1988 Adelaide Festival, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and was runner-up for the Prix Femina Etranger. It has been translated into ten languages and published throughout the world. Prince of the Lilies appeared in 1991 and Jones's third novel, Billy Sunday, four years later. Billy Sunday was the 1995 Age fiction Book of the Year and won the 1996 National Book Council Award for fiction. The Boston Globe called it 'the Great American Novel'. The follow-up, Nightpictures, was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award. Swan Bay (2003), Jones's fifth and most recent novel, was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's and Queensland Literary Awards. All of his books are short and complex, avowedly literary and sometimes controversial. 'We tell stories about things we can't talk about,' Jones has said. He has taught at various Australian institutions, including a four-year stint as a writer in residence at La Trobe University, and overseas. Rod Jones lives near Melbourne. He is working on a novel, Empire Street, to be published by Text in 2014.