MISTER PIP

MISTER PIP is a love story, a story about the meaning of names and the power of words. It is about growing up, survival and the search for clues to make sense of life.

Thirteen year old Matilda lives with her mother on the Pacific island of Bougainville, which suddenly becomes a violent place: Rebels want the copper mine, which is poisoning their island, to close. They are trying to drive the redskin army, enemies from neighbouring Papua New Guinea, into the sea.

The abandoned schoolhouse is overgrown with jungle. In this troubled world, Mr Watts decides he will open the school once more, and read 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens aloud to his students, a chapter a day. Stories flourish on the island. While the lives of Pip and Magwitch and other characters from 'Great Expectations' 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, devil women and a dozen other subjects.

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. Matilda may never stop looking for him.

MISTER PIP is a dazzling imaginative achievement, a novel about loyalty, betrayal, grief, love and memory, about how we are shaped by the words that can transform our lives or kill us.

Lloyd Jones was born in New Zealand in 1955. He is the author of nine previous novels and collections of stories, which include 'Biographi' (a New York Times Best Book) and 'The Book of Fame' (winner of the Deutz medal for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize).

MISTER PIP
Deutsch von Grete Osterwald
[HC: Rowohlt, 05/08]