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  • Published: 3 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9781742749891
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

Dreams Of Speaking




A vision of Japan as you have never imagined it. A brilliant and moving novel about displacement and belonging by the award-winning author of Sixty Lights and Five Bells.

A vision of Japan as you have never imagined it. A brilliant and moving novel about displacement and belonging by the award-winning author of Sixty Lights and Five Bells.
She wished to study the unremarked beauty of modern things, of telephones, aeroplanes, computer screens and electric lights, of television, cars and underground transportation. There had to be in the world of mechanical efficiency some mystery of transaction, the summoning of remote meanings, an extra dimension - supernatural, sure. There had to be a lost sublimity, of something once strange, now familiar, tame.‘‘We must talk, Alice Black, about this world of modern things. This buzzing world."

Alice is entranced by the aesthetics of technology and, in every aeroplane flight, every Xerox machine, every neon sign, sees the poetry of modernity. Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the atomic bomb, is an expert on Alexander Graham Bell. Like Alice, he is culturally and geographically displaced. The pair forge an unlikely friendship as Mr Sakamoto regales Alice with stories of twentieth-century invention. His own knowledge begins to inform her writing, and these two solitary beings become a mutual support for each other a long way from home.

This novel from prize-winning author Gail Jones is distinguished in its honesty and intelligence. From the boundlessness of space walking to the frustrating constrictions of one person's daily existence, Dreams of Speaking paints with grace and skill the experience of needing to belong despite wanting to be alone.

  • Published: 3 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9781742749891
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

About the author

Gail Jones

Gail Jones lives in Sydney and teaches at the University of Western Sydney. Her books have won numerous literary awards in Australia. She is the author of two collections of short stories and five novels including Sixty Lights which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Dreams of Speaking which was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize, and Sorry which was longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels Black Mirror, Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry, Five Bells and A Guide to Berlin. Three times shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, her prizes include the WA Premier's Award for Fiction, the Nita B. Kibble Award, the Steele Rudd Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the Adelaide Festival Award for Fiction and the ASAL Gold Medal. She has also been shortlisted for international awards, including the IMPAC and the Prix Femina. Her fiction has been translated into nine languages.

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Praise for Dreams Of Speaking

Dreams takes flight... with bravura flair.

Time Magazine

Jones is an extraordinary writer no matter what genre she is working in ... this novel strikes the most successful balance I've seen in her work so far

Australian Book Review