Mr Pip

On worn torn Bougainville Island, a teacher (the only white man in the village) – begins to read at school each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations. He becomes known as ‘Mr Pip’ and inspires his students especially the young Matilda. Bougainville is no longer an island paradise – it’s a ravaged, murderous place where children are forced to live by their wits. After a series of tragic events Matilda begins to lose her will to live, but is revived by the memory of Pip and the power of literature to offer escape and solace in the worst of times.

A little Gauguin, a bit of Lord Jim, the novel's lyricism evokes great beauty and great pain.
– Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2007.

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.   –Fantastic Fiction website.

Citation:  Jones, Lloyd. Mister Pip. Melbourne : Text Publishing, 2008.  220 pages.

Official website for Mr Pip:  http://www.randomhouse.com/book/88486/mister-pip-by-lloyd-jones

The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007.  It won the 2007 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for best book in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific and the 2007 American Library Association Literary Awards. 

Also available in large print, audiobook and movie.

Click here to watch the Mr Pip movie trailer.

The light between oceans

Set in 1918 on a remote island lighthouse off Southwest Australia. A dramatic wild setting where Tom Sherbourne has retreated to live a solitary life in the hope of erasing his emotional scars after distinguished service in World War I. While on leave he meets Isabel, they marry and she joins him at the lighthouse.  In peaceful isolation their romance blooms - but after 4 years and several heartbreaking miscarriages, their marriage is tested to the limit. Two weeks after the tragic loss of a premature baby, a dinghy drifts ashore carrying a dead man and a newborn baby in great distress. Against Tom’s protests, Isabel wants to keep the baby that she sees as a gift from God. Only years later will they understand that the choice they make will haunt them forever.

CITATION: Stedman, M.L., The light between oceans. North Sydney, NSW: Vintage Books, 2012.

The New York Times bestseller soon to be a major motion picture from Spielberg’s Dreamworks that is “irresistible…seductive…with a high concept plot that keeps you riveted from the first page.”  –O, The Oprah Magazine.

Also available in large print, audiobook & kindle ebook.
More about this book including video interview with the author and 'browse inside' feature from the Publishers website - Simon and Schuster.

Hollywood comes to Stanley, (Tasmania) starring Michael Fassbender, Rachel Weisz.

Stanley, Tasmania.     photo credit - ABC News

Cloud Atlas

 

An ambitious novel presenting six different stories set in different time periods. Each story is read by the main character in the next chapter. After the sixth story, the other five stories are returned to and closed. The first begins in Chatham Islands (a remote Pacific archipelago off the coast of New Zealand) with the diary of a 19th-century notary. The second story shifts to 1931 with the letters of a penniless composer in 1931 Belgium. Then we meet a 1970s reporter who gets in the way of a nuclear energy company in California and a genetically engineered serf in a future "corpocracy" who slowly gains awareness of her plight. Finally we return to the Chatham islands, only centuries later in a post-civilisation world.

...brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. – Goodreads   

Citation: Mitchell, David. The cloud atlas. London : Sceptre, 2004.

Available as a CD audiobook, kindle ebook + an enhanced edition with audio and video. Adapted for film starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry.

Watch the video interview with David Mitchell :