An unknown woman – traumatised, amnesiac, unable to speak – is found just north of Broken Hill in western New South Wales. Who she is and what happened to her is the question that drives Gail Jones’s twelfth novel, The Name of the Sister.

Angie is a journalist in inner-city Sydney, recently gone freelance, and Bev, her oldest and dearest friend, is leading the police investigation. Their friendship goes back to childhood when they grew up together in a small country town, sharing ‘constitutional seriousness … the ability to not look away, to search for deeper meanings, to take themselves seriously’ and a love of sophisticated wordplay. Bev was the child of a respectable police officer who had ‘given in to the Law of the Father’; Angie’s father was an alcoholic and jobbing labourer ‘with the glum notoriety of a failure’. With Bev’s inside knowledge, Angie begins to write a long-form journalistic story about the unknown woman. The novel’s use of free indirect discourse, focalised through Angie, is sometimes strained; I was not always sure whose perspective I was receiving.