Gail Jones, Salonika Burning

- When wars, even the drumbeats of war, define our times, when deadly viruses are running rampart, when medical services are under severe stress, this beautiful new novel by celebrated Australian author Gail Jones digs deep and offers hope.

- It is 1917 in the city of Salonika (now Thessaloniki) in Macedonia. Before the first world war Salonika was abuzz with life, colour and charm. Now it was a burnt city. That was the omen. That was the sign everything was coming apart. Demolition by fire. 

- Jones' sharp, sensitive writing, with its poetic edge, brings the drama vividly to life (…he could hear the scrawny bushes murmur with soft fingerings of breeze). We're introduced to four main characters, two of them Australian women (Olive and Stella), one an English woman (Grace), and one a young English man (Stanley). Something within them perhaps knew the idiocy of this war, of all wars, and the waste that claimed them.

- The four have very different backgrounds and family circumstances. Olive is from a wealthy banking family so she purchases a truck and converts it to an ambulance servicing the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Salonika. 

- Grace is the only girl in a family of ten children. She became a surgeon as a means to escape her suffocating Plymouth Brethren family. She was hieratic and remote... and considered all Australians essentially ignorant...She seemed to have no regard for the dense world of sentiment, for small, fragile and personal things. 

- Stella is the assistant cook at the hospital (with romantic ambitions to become a writer), and a rather fervid nationalist. A bookish daughter was a scandal in farming circles. (Jones in her Author's Note at the end of the novel discloses that Stella was based on Stella Miles Franklin, well known of course to all of us).

- Stanley, is a medical orderly and an artist attracted to ancient history, architecture and poetry. He was also religious and like his shy colleague George, not attracted to women. 

- As the war proceeds they are confronted by ugliness and death and the uncomfortable challenges to character and decency that they bring. Some measure up, some don't. 

- This is a real gem of a novel, and has just been shortlisted for the 2023 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. It would not surprise me if it won, though the other five shortlisted novels are superb too.