Gone

Gone

While living in a car on the outskirts of Alice Springs, author Jennifer Mills wrote Gone, the haunting story of Frank, an ex-prisoner who is hitch-hiking across Australia in search of a home he only dimly remembers.

Travelling some 4,000 km through an unforgiving landscape, his hands empty, his identity gone, Frank survives on what he finds and the generosity of strangers. He hasn't been home for 15 years. Like a bowerbird, Frank steals pieces of story from the people who give him lifts, weaving them into a whole. But that whole is precarious, unravelling.

In approaching his past Frank is forced to confront the spectre of his own crimes. As Frank edges closer to a home he struggles to remember, his boyhood looms. Out of the past, as memories surface, something is coming that will tear through his fragile hold on reality.

A talented emerging voice on the Australian literary scene, Mills says she was inspired to write Gone by her experiences hitch-hiking around Australia and other parts of the world since she was 18, and living in the Northern Territory. 'My life has been research for this. I wrote Gone because I was interested in memory and justice, in the ways in which we imagine the past and fail to accept responsibility for it. The experience of homelessness [living in a car] was an economic thing for me, but it turned out to be essential to get the perspective right.'

For 33-year-old Mills, there were some significant challenges in writing Gone, particularly writing from the perspective of someone with a mental illness - however literary or metaphorical that diagnosis may be. Mills says, 'there are several layers of delusion at work in Gone - I had to make several semi-coherent realities within the reality of the book, so there are a few fictions-within-fictions operating. I often refer to fiction writing as a benign form of schizophrenia, and this book really made me question the benign part.'

Dedicated to the countless truckies who have given Mills lifts over the past 15 years, Gone is a chilling and suspenseful novel; a crossing into one man's splintered world.

Jennifer Mills is the author of the novel The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a chapbook of poems, Treading Earth (Press Press, 2009). She was the winner of the 2008 Marian Eldridge Award for Young Emerging Women Writers, the Pacific Region of the 2008-9 Commonwealth Short Story Competition, and the 2008 Northern Territory Literary Awards: Best Short Story. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Hecate, Overland, Heat, the Griffith Review, Best Australian Stories 2007, and New Australian Stories 2. Jennifer lives in Alice Springs.

Gone
Author: Jennifer Mills
ISBN: 9780702238710
Price: $34.95