Hand Me Down World

A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from north Africa to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old by his father and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid's uniform and a knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers— some generous, some exploiting—to guide her passage north.

These strangers tell of their encounters with a quiet, mysterious woman in a blue coat—each account a different view of the truth, a different truth. And slowly these fragments of a life piece together to create a spellbinding story of the courage of a mother and the versions of truth we create to accommodate our lives.

Haunting and beautiful, Hand Me Down World is simply unforgettable.

About The Author

Lloyd Jones is a New Zealand author who currently resides in Wellington. He is a graduate of Victoria University. In 1988 he was the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship.

In 1994 he curated an exhibition which illustrated the New Zealand Saturday. This work was a collaboration with photographer Bruce Foster and held at the National Library in Wellington. The work was published as the 'The Last Saturday' and included historical photographs, contemporary ones by Foster and an essay by Jones. In May 2003, a theatrical adaptation of his novel 'The Book of Fame' was presented at Wellington's Downstage Theatre.

In May 2007, he won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Overall Best Book Award for his novel Mister Pip. The novel is set during the Bougainville Civil War of the early 1990s. His novel Mister Pip was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2007.