The Death of Noah Glass
Shortlist year:
2019
Shortlist category:
Fiction
Published by:
Text Publishing
About the book
The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the pool at his Sydney apartment block. His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father’s death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. Gail Jones's mesmerising new novel tells a story about parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns that life makes. The Death of Noah Glass is about love and art, about grief and happiness, about memory and the mystery of time.
About the author
Gail Jones
The author of seven novels and two collections of stories, Gail Jones is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, awarded several prizes in Australia. Internationally her fiction has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger.
Judges’ comments
Gail Jones's The Death of Noah Glass opens with a body floating in a swimming pool and remains, at one level, a gripping mystery that investigates an Australian art historian's death and his connection to an Italian art theft. However, Jones's seventh novel also epitomises her talent for writing finely layered fiction that draws on deep knowledge of visual arts, cinema, and literature, including the Italian detective novel, as she lightly drops allusions and images that enrich the narrative. Her restrained, observant prose sensitively plumbs the grief of Glass's adult children—an artist and a philosopher—as they seek to understand their father and thus themselves. The action moves between vivid locales—Sydney, Western Australia, Sicily—and between past and present. This is a highly accomplished novel about the unknowability of others, even those closest to us, and the consolations of art, by an author of distinctive and fully matured style.
