Salonika Burning

By: Gail Jones

Narrated by: Nicole Nabout

Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Macedonia, 1917. The great city of Salonika is engulfed by fire as all of Europe is ravaged by war.

Amid the destruction are those who have come to the frontlines to heal – surgeons, ambulance drivers, nurses, orderlies and other volunteers. Four of them – Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley – are at the centre of Gail Jones’s extraordinary new novel, which takes its inspiration from the wartime experiences of Australians Miles Franklin and Olive King, and British painters Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In Jones’s imagination these four lives intertwine and change, each compelled by the desire to create something meaningful in the ruins of a broken world.

©2022 Gail Jones. First published by The Text Publishing Company. (P)2024 Bolinda Publishing

Critic reviews

'Gail Jones has to be one of Australia’s most consistently impressive writers. Her prose is evocative, her plots meaningful and her characters drawn with considerable care…[Salonika Burning] is just as reliably lush, moving and literary as everything else she’s written.' (Guardian)

'Elegant and intensely ruminative ... Jones’s language in Salonika Burning is at once muscular and delicate, her narrative precise yet impressionistic ... Jones has written some fine novels ... but none finer than Salonika Burning.’ (Australian Book Review)

'Fans of Jones’s gift with words will appreciate this moving, poetic and meditative tribute to war, suffering, fortitude and the human spirit.' (Books+Publishing)