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From the author of the beloved, bestselling Mister Pip: a novel about a mother's search for her stolen child. A novel you can't stop thinking about.
A woman washes up on a beach in Sicily. She has come from Tunisia to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid's uniform and a homemade knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers — some generous, some malevolent — to guide her passage north. These strangers tell of their encounters with her, building her story in fragments of memory, prejudice and sentiment into a moving work of sacrifice and love. Hand Me Down World tells an epic story about the courage of a mother, the versions of truth to which we accommodate our lives, and love's ultimate power to redeem us.
"Haunting... . A delicate exploration of how our words voyage away from our thoughts, and how we seek asylum from actual experience in the crafted realm of memory." —The Telegraph
"A ... nomadic spirit informs his creative imagination... . Daring and emotionally involving." —The Independent
"Unselfconsciously cosmopolitan both in its story and in its register, and Jones is the kind of writer who can slip naturally from the low to the lyrical in the space of a paragraph." —The Observer
This information about Hand Me Down World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lloyd Jones was born in in Lower Hutt, New Zealand in 1955. His best-known works include Mister Pip, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Book of Fame, winner of numerous literary awards; Hand Me Down World; and his acclaimed memoir A History of Silence. Jones lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
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