A luminous, finely crafted, sometimes jubilant, sometimes sad novel about time and art, history and loss, resilience and redemption, it is, as we have come to expect from this softly spoken academic, as beguiling as it is provocative. Not that Jones resiles from any residual political implications of Five Bells, which is at one level a kind of homage to Australia's cultural diversity. 'I want to help people think about imagining the life of others in an empathetic way and that is a political act in some ways,' she says.

An academic who turned to writing 'relatively late in life', Jones penned her first award-winning novel Black Mirror in 2002, and has, in little over a decade, moved herself to the very fore of Australian writing with such finely wrought, visually charged novels as Sixty Lights, long-listed for the Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Award, and Dreams of Speaking, shortlisted for the 2007 Miles Franklin Award, the Orange Prize and the IMPAC.

Her most recent, and perhaps most politically charged novel to date, Sorry, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the Prime Minister's Literary Award and France's Prix Femina Etranger in 2008. In that same year, Jones moved to Sydney to take up a professorship at the University of Western Sydney, then a writer's residency in China, an experience that also bled into Five Bells in potent and unexpected ways.

'I saw these old people walking backwards in Shanghai, and it just bowled me over. I found that so transfixing, the idea that you might learn something by working backwards, and it symbolised exactly the paradox of remembering, but not really remembering. I'm very interested in what we know and don't know - that sort of idea that we carry all of our past with us, and sometimes we kind of collapse back into it, and sometimes it overwhelms us.'

All but one of the characters in Five Bells carry an invisible history from elsewhere. Ellie is preoccupied by a youthful love affair, James by a tragedy for which he still feels responsible. Catherine is haunted by the loss of her brother in Dublin, and Pei Xing, by the Cultural Revolution. The daughter of the man who translated Dr Zhivago into Chinese, then was later persecuted for it, Pei brings to the novel a compelling history and a mysterious potency.

But it is the presence of a fifth person on Circular Quay, a child, who will shadow all that unfolds in a novel that reaches beyond the glittering surface of Sydney to capture the rippling patterns of a wider human history with beauty and power.

For Jones, Five Bells is all about patterns. 'Patterns that open, patterns that close, patterns that repeat. I'm interested in that, and in the way that art might consolidate or contest those patterns. I wanted to be foregrounding the fact that in all of our lives, we have these symbolic patterns. It takes a while to get a sense of the pattern of your own life and a sense of the repetition; the way one repeats one's parents or the way one repeats elements of the historical codes we've been given. And it is certainly about the idea of acknowledging the historical. That you don't understand the pattern that you're in until you acknowledge your history, and the history of other people and respect the historical as part of people's identity.'

Identity in all its complexity has preoccupied Jones ever since she penned her first collection of stories, The House of Breathing, in 1992. But then so too, have notions of art and grief, memory and history, and Five Bells is both an extension and a re-configuration of these concerns and is particularly concerned, says Jones, 'with foregrounding aesthetic experience as kind of political and as having a potential to think about the past and future in different ways. That art is generative, that it is a kind of resource. I don't mean it in a commercial way, but that the art is a resource for thinking and imagining different kinds of future and for imaging the past that someone might carry.'

Notoriously reticent about her own past, Jones is powered both in life and on the page by an all-consuming curiosity about everything from the mundane to the arcane. She harboured ambitions of being a painter before she began writing, and happily admits to a contest between the word and the visual image in all her work. She'll also own up to a preoccupation with grief in all her books but says she never intended to write about it in Five Bells.

Yet she acknowledges its unintended intrusion in the novel as a kind of powerful undertow. 'Grief is one of the great things of literature, I've decided. I see people completely undone by grief and lives upended, so to give that its space seems to me important.'