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.

Bodily Harm

Rennie is a young journalist whose comfortable world falls apart when she discovers that she has breast cancer. After her operation, she returns to find policemen in her apartment, investigating the presence of an intruder, an invader who has made himself at home in her kitchen and left a length of rope on her bed. Unnerved by these events, she decides on a holiday escape. She flies to St. Antoine, a fictitious Caribbean island.

...on the tiny island of St.  Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply.  By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love. – Random House.

CITATION: Atwood, Margaret. Bodily Harm. New York : Bantam Books, 1996. 



Available in large print, audiobook, ebook. Look inside or listen to a sample at Amazon.
Listen to Margaret Atwood interviewed by Fay Weldon about Bodily Harm. (British Library mp3).