Customer Reviews

Sixty Lights. Gail Jones

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Lucy Strange and her brother Tom grow up in Melbourne, Australia in the mid 19th century, and are unfortunately orphaned, while just young children. Their uncle takes them to London where they live for a few years until Lucy is persuaded by her uncle, to travel to India to meet an old friend of his, with a view to possible marriage. During the long sea voyage, Lucy is willingly seduced by an older, married man and arrives to tell her prospective husband of her pregnancy. Despite an initial reserve between them, they soon become good, platonic friends, with him promising to support her and to return her to England when the baby is old enough to travel. While in India, Lucy meets one of the early photographers of the day and becomes his pupil, learning the then difficult processes of photography with its accompanying complicated chemical treatments. Upon her return to England, she furthers her studies of the art and discovers that she has contracted tuberculosis while abroad.
The author of this book writes beautiful, lyrical prose, both ethereal and haunting and full of the heroine's fantasy of light and shade, sometimes taking three pages to describe a single scene, while I just wanted to get on with the story. It's a dreamy, floaty kind of book and, if that's what you like, this is for you.