Shanghai, 1927: hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, is an anonymous expatriate treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, the wife of an Australian missionary, is sent to him for psychoanalysis, he is seduced into her world, a kaleidoscope of incestuous eroticism and grotesque hallucinations.But Ayres hides an even darker secret...Rod Jones is the author of five novels, short stories and travel writing. His first novel, Julia Paradise, won the fiction prize at the 1988 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was runner-up for France's Femina Etranger prize. It has been published throughout the world. His third novel, Billy Sunday, was the 1995 Age Book of the Year for fiction and won the 1996 National Book Council Award for fiction. Nightpictures was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Literary...

In 1917, while the world is at war, Alma and her children are living in a sleep-out at the back of Mrs Lovett's house in working-class Footscray. When Alma falls pregnant, her daughter Molly is born in secret. As Molly grows up, there is a man who sometimes follows her on her way to school.Anna meets Neil in 1952 at her parents' shack at Cockatoo. She later enters a Salvation Army home for unmarried mothers, but is determined to keep her baby. Fitzroy, 1975. Student life. Things are different now, aren't they? Cathy and David are living together, determined not to get married. Against the background of the tumultuous events of the sacking of the Whitlam government, a new chapter is added to the family's story. The Mothers is a book about secrets. It interweaves the intimate lives of three generations of Australian women who learn that it's the stories we can't tell that continue to shape us and make us who we are. Rod Jones’s first...