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The Dial Press
August 2007
On Sale: July 31, 2007
272 pages
ISBN: 0385341067
EAN: 9780385341066
Hardcover
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Women's Fiction
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.
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