“Jones’s radical, detailed vision of what extremes it might take to unlearn misogyny is rendered with insight, immediacy, and painful honesty. This gut-punch of a story is sure to start conversations.”
Available Now / $16.95 / 288 pages
Jonathon Bridge has a corner office in a top-tier software firm, tailored suits, and an impeccable pedigree. He has a fascinating wife, Adalia; a child on the way; and a string of pretty young interns as lovers on the side. He’s a man who’s going places. His world is our world: the same chaos and sprawl, haves and have-nots, men and women, skyscrapers and billboards. But it also exists alongside a vast, self-sustaining city-state called The Fortress where the indigenous inhabitants—the Vaik, a society run and populated exclusively by women—live in isolation.
When Adalia discovers his indiscretions and the ugly sexual violence pervading his firm, she agrees to continue their fractured marriage only on the condition that Jonathan voluntarily offers himself to The Fortress as a supplicant and stay there for a year. Jonathon’s arrival at The Fortress begins with a recitation of the conditions of his stay: He is forbidden to ask questions, to raise his hand in anger, and to refuse sex.
Jonathon is utterly unprepared for what will happen to him over the course of the year—not only to his body, but to his mind and his heart. This absorbing, confronting, and moving novel asks questions about consent, power, love, and fulfillment. It asks what it takes for a man to change, and whether change is possible without a radical reversal of the conditions that seem normal.
Content notice: The Fortress contains references to objectification of and violence against women, pedophilia, sexual assault, submission, and toxic masculinity.
S. A. Jones is a Melbourne-based novelist and essayist whose work has been published in venues including The Guardian. She holds a PhD in history and has been a senior executive and a Shadow Ministerial staffer. In 2013 she was recognized by Westpac and The Australian Financial Review as one of Australia's 100 Women of Influence for her public policy work. The Fortress is her third novel.
Praise for The Fortress
“Jones creates a world that . . . deeply explores the meanings of consent and power. There are moments of graphic violence and sex. Fans of Joanne Ramos’s The Farm and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments may enjoy this role-reversal story.” - Library Journal
“The text plies at societies’ gender hierarchies with intelligence, reversing the standard to startling effect. As Vaik women demand pleasure from the men who toil beneath them, questions arise about the limitations of implied consent. Every such question can be reversed to indict contemporary society; on close examination, every indignity that Jonathon suffers is reflected tenfold in real time. Each raw turn in the novel holds a counterargument that people are significant and should be treated as such. So resisting the notion that gender inequality can be waited out, The Fortress is a compassionate and piercing speculative novel.” - Foreword Magazine
“This timely and often uncomfortable read, like The Handmaid’s Tale, is a guaranteed conversation starter for book clubs.” - Booklist
“Unsettling and unashamed, The Fortress is a damning judgment on patriarchy, and a meditation on the labours of atonement.” —Damon Young, award-winning philosopher and author
“An imaginative exploration of the contours and confines of patriarchy, and what might lay beyond them, as immersive and thought-provoking as the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin.” —The Sydney Morning Herald
“The Fortress is a visceral, uncomfortable read that scrutinizes, among other things, society’s approach in its treatment of women and how to resolves the gender and power issues we face today.” —Tor.com