Hand Me Down World

Praise for Mister Pip

'Lloyd Jones brings to life the transformative power of fiction ... The experience of reading in this book is tangible ...This is a beautiful book. It is tender, multi-layered and redemptive'

'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'

'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'

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

'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'

'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'

'An intelligent novel that says as much about the power of reading as it does about bloodshed and loss'

'Mister Pip is a powerful and humane novel from one of New Zealand's top writers'

'Rarely ... can any novel have combined charm, horror and uplift in quite such superabundance'

'Jones proves sly, engaging, worth-reading and even re-reading'

'Haunting and morally complex, the novel deserves its place on the list and would make a worthy winner'

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

'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'

'A novel that, with amplitude and ease, affirms the acts of reading and writing as precious pursuits, as acts of survival, escape, renewal'

A captivating read

'Magical and enchanting'

'Mister Pip is a traditional novel, but it also topical ... Regardless of who wins on October 16th. Mister Pip, through the simplicity and candour of Matilda's singular narrative voice, may prove the most difficult to forget'

'It's a wonderfully refreshing book which gives you much to think about long after finishing'

Compelling . . . vivid . . . intense . . . one of the most significant novelists writing today

Humane and moving, it's a worthy successor to Jones's last novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mister Pip

Artfully constructed and delicately nuanced . . . Hand Me Down World has an eerie compulsion

Everyone will want to read Hand Me Down World and few will be able to stop thinking about it after they do

The novel's readability belies its great depth . . . Jones's novel is haunting to the very final line

This is, to make a bold claim, an extraordinary novel . . . Jones is a daring writer who can be relied on to ignore expectation, and is becoming one of the most interesting, honest and thought-provoking novelists working today

'A haunting tale of a mother's search for her only child'

Gripping . . . Jones subtly dramatises this crucial ethical dilemma with strong characters. Vulnerable and abused, the woman holds the reader's sympathy yet repays almost every kindness with theft and betrayal. Jones artfully builds these contradictory impulses into richly textured layers to create a compelling narrative and an absorbing disquisition on relative morality and justice

'A startling novel'