Title: Mister Pip
Description: In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations. So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, "A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe." Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.From the Hardcover edition.
Subjects: Fiction, Books and reading, Books and reading in fiction, Storytelling, Storytelling in fiction, Bougainville Crisis, Papua New Guinea, 1988-, Bougainville Crisis, Papua New Guinea, 1988- in fiction, Fine books, Specimens, Literature, Reading Level-Grade 7, Reading Level-Grade 9, Reading Level-Grade 8, Reading Level-Grade 11, Reading Level-Grade 10, Reading Level-Grade 12, New Zealand fiction, Coming of age, War, Teachers, Mothers and daughters, 18.07 English literature outside Europe and the USA, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, war & military, Fiction, historical, general, Papua new guinea, fiction, Fiction, coming of age, Fiction, historical, General, Fiction, general
Places: Bougainville Island (Papua New Guinea), Nieuw-Zeeland, Papua New Guinea