A young woman stumbles onto an outback road at night and is lit up in the headlights of an approaching car. Who is she? Nobody knows, and she has lost the ability to speak.

This is how the story of the Unknown Woman begins. Angie, a freelance journalist, joins her childhood friend Bev, the police officer in charge of the case, to try to solve the mystery.

Dozens of people claim to know the speech-less woman. The stories multiply. In an urgent, unexpected finale, more questions arise.

Set in Sydney and the Mars-red landscapes around Broken Hill, Gail Jones’s The Name of the Sister is an elegant and thrilling novel that explores the unreliable terrain between the truth and the stories we tell each other.