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Mister Pip

Jones, Lloyd

Jones’ novel is set mainly in a small village on Bougainville, where Matilda attends the school set up by Mr Watts. By his own admission he’s not much of a teacher and proceeds to educate the children by reading them Charles Dicken's Great Expectations. Matilda falls in love with the novel and the promise of the next chapter is what keeps her going: Pip’s story protects her from the horror of what is happening around her — menacing helicopters in the skies above the village and rebel raids on the ground. After several visits to the village by soldiers, the novel goes missing and is then destroyed. Mr Watts encourages the children to retell the story, the whole being constructed from their remembered fragments. Later, when she has fled the island for Australia, Matilda finds a copy of Great Expectations in the school library and realises that Mr Watts was reading them his own version of the text, another ‘invention’ of the original. New B-format edition.

Mister Pip won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best Book 2007. In the same year it also won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Readers' Choice Award, and the Deutz Medal for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007. In 2008 it won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for Fiction.

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