Jane Alison was born in 1961 in Canberra, Australia, and until she was eleven grew up in the Australian and U.S. foreign services. She went to public schools in Washington, D.C., and studied classics at Princeton and Brown universities and creative writing at Columbia. Before writing fiction, she worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Washington City Paper, the Miami New Times, and Tulane University; she has also been a freelance editor and illustrator.

Her first novel, The Love-Artist, was published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and has been translated into seven languages. It was followed by The Marriage of the Sea, a New York Times Notable Book of 2003, and Natives and Exotics, one of 2005’s recommended readings by Alan Cheuse of National Public Radio. Her short fiction and critical writing have appeared in TriQuarterly, Seed, Five Points, The Germanic Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Miami Beach.

Books by Jane Alison

Natives and Exotics

by Jane Alison

In 1970, nine-year-old Alice is ravished by the beauty of Ecuador, a country her parents are helping to despoil. Forty years earlier, Alice's newlywed grandmother Violet confronts her country's past as she makes a home in the wilds of Australia. And before that, in early nineteenth-century Scotland, Violet's great-great-grandfather George flees to the Azores, unaware that he will have a hand in destroying the earthly paradise there..