Eerie Compulsion

Lloyd Jones’ latest novel Hand Me Down World is reviewed in the Financial Times. Hand Me Down World, about an illegal immigrant who makes her way from Tunis to Berlin to find her son who has been abducted, has an “eerie compulsion”, according to reviewer DJ Taylor. Jones’ novel describes “the smashed mosaic of a single life, reconfigured out of two dozen scattered tiles,” Taylor writes. “The life that is laboriously pieced together in this series of ‘testimonies’ belongs — a loaded word, given that she owns practically nothing — to Ines, a young African woman first found working in a Tunisian hotel. Each of these encounters [on Ines’ purposeful progress northward to Berlin] is neatly done, while hinting at the various dangers that lurk in the ‘serial voices’ form.” Jones lives in Wellington. In 27, he won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Overall Best Book Award for his novel Mister Pip. He was the 27 recipient of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency.