Mister Pip - Lloyd Jones

Mister Pip

By: Lloyd Jones

Paperback | 25 September 2006 | Edition Number 1

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Winner of Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2007

'You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.'

Matilda lives on an island somewhere in the Pacific-but this is no paradise. Civil war is a fact of life, though at first the village is largely left alone by the soldiers and the rebel fighters. The school is closed but then Mr Watts, the only white man on the island, steps forward to do what he can to help.

He begins by reading Great Expectations aloud to his students, a chapter a day. Stories flourish on the island. While the lives of Pip and Magwitch and other Dickens' characters are transformed in their new tropical setting, the locals come to the schoolhouse to tell their own tales-about the meaning of the colour blue, about broken dreams, black birds and devil women.

In Matilda's eyes, Pip is as real as any living person. He has become her friend. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. That's where the redskin soldiers see it, and decide they must track this stranger down. Who is this Mr Pip? The search to find him will have devastating consequences for Matilda, Mr Watts and the entire village.
Industry Reviews
'It's clear from the first page that this is prize-winning stuff... Being a truthful writer, Jones sees nothing neither his heroes nor his villains in black and white. His is a bold inquiry into the way that we construct and repair our communities, and ourselves, with stories old and new.' - The Times

'In this dazzling story-within-a-story, Jones has created a microcosm of post-colonial literature, hybridising the narratives of back and white races to create a new and resonant fable... There is a fittingly dreamy lyrical quality to Jones's writing, along with an acute ear for the earthly harmonies of village speech... Mister Pip is the first of Jones's six novels to have travelled from his native New Zealand to the UK. It is so hoped that it won't be the last.' - Observer

'Mister Pip is a poignant and impressive work which can take its place alongside the classical novels of adolescence.' - Times Literary Supplement

'A major word-of-mouth bestseller.' - Sue Baker, Publishing News

'Intriguing and memorable.' - Glasgow Herald

'Cleverly encapsulating what it is to be an orphan, an immigrant or a person dispossessed of a regular beat of life, this extraordinary story...' - Good Housekeeping

'Exotic locations add a dreamy quality to... Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones... Jones' lyrical novel centres around a group of children in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, during the civil war in the Nineties.' - Vogue

'Morally subtle, Mister Pip has none of arid cleverness that often mars novels about books, making it a worthy winner of this year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize.' - Daily Mail

'Darker and more morally complex than it appears... Lloyd Jones gives the tired post-colonial themes of self-reinvention and the reinterpretation of classic texts a fresh, ingenious twist but his real achievement is bringing life and depth to his characters.' - Sunday Telegraph

'A must-read tale of survival by storytelling.' - Image Magazine

"One of the best books of the year! Poetic, heartbreaking, surprising. Matilda is a young girl in Bougainville, a tropical island where the horror of civil war lurks. Mr. Watts, the only white person, is the self appointed teacher of the tiny school where the only textbook is the Dickens novel Great Expectations. Storytelling, imagination, courage, beauty, memories and sudden violence are the main elements of this extraordinary book." - Isabel Allende

"Genuinely affecting... A book with worthwhile thoughts to impart." - The New York Times

Mister Pip is sheer magic, a story about stories and their power to transcend the limits of imagination and reside in the deep heart's core. Lloyd Jones is a brave and fierce writer, and he has given us Dickens brand new again.” - Keith Donohue, author of The Stolen Child

"Jones's prose is fautless... With a mixture of thrill and unease, Matilda discovers independent thought, and Jones captures the intricate, emotionally loaded evolution of the mother-daughter relationship." - Publishers Weekly

“The novel is a paean to the transformative power of literature, particularly its ability to occlude an unpleasant reality with a fictional alternative and to expand an individual's sense of possibility.” - New York Sun

“Not just a delightful read, Mister Pip shows the cut and thrust of true multiculturalism.” - Atlantic Monthly

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