You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s tropical island, only one white person stays behind. Mr Watts wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley. The kids call him Pop Eye. But there is no one else to teach them their lessons. Mr Watts begins to read aloud to the class from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr Dickens.

Soon Dickens’ hero Pip starts to come alive for Matilda. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun.

But Matilda is not the only one who believes in Pip. And, on an island at war, the power of the imagination can be a dangerously provocative thing.

Praise for Mister Pip

‘Mister Pip is a rare, original and truly beautiful novel. It reminds us that every act of reading and telling is a transformation, and that stories, even painful ones, may carry possibilities of redemption.’
Gail Jones

‘As compelling as a fairytale—beautiful, shocking and profound.’
Helen Garner

‘Roll the drums. Flourish the trumpets. Release the pigeons. Yes, the fanfare accompanying Lloyd Jones’ new novel is well-deserved…It reads like the effortless soar and dip of a grand piece of music, thrilling singular voices, the darker, moving chorus, the blend of the light and shade, the thread of grief urgent in every beat and the occasional faint, lingering note of hope…Jones is matchless…Read this novel and Mr Watts, and perhaps Matilda, will migrate instantly into your heart.’
Age

About the Author
Lloyd Jones was born in New Zealand in 1955. He is the author of nine previous novels and collections of stories, which include the award-winning The Book of Fame, Biografi, a New York Times Notable Book, Choo Woo, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance and Paint Your Wife. Lloyd Jones lives in Wellington.

Paperback (C format) | ISBN: 1 921145 57 9 | RRP: $29.95 | 256pp

September 2006

A significant departure for Maggie O’Farrell in terms of maturity and style, THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX will be one of the unmissable publishing events of 2006.Ladies and gentlemen behold. It is most important to keep yourself very still. Even breathing can remind them that you are there, so only very short, very shallow breaths. Just enough to stay alive. Set between the 1930s, and the present, Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel is the story of Esme, a woman edited out of her family’s history, and of the secrets that come to light when, sixty years later, she is released from care, and a young woman, Iris, discovers the great aunt she never knew she had.The mystery that unfolds is the heartbreaking tale of two sisters in colonial India and 1930s Edinburgh – of the loneliness that binds them together and the rivalries that drive them apart, and lead one of them to a shocking betrayal.

SATURDAY

Ian McEwan

The brilliant new novel by one of Britain’s finest writers.

Description of the Book

Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man – a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind, a newspaper lawyer, and proud father of two grown-up children, one a promising poet, the other a talented blues musician. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world – the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city, its openness and diversity, and his happy family life are under threat.
Later, Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne’s professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him.
Towards the end of a day rich in incident and filled with Perowne’s celebrations of life’s pleasures – music, food, love, the exhilarations of sport and the satisfactions of exacting work – his family gathers for a reunion. But with the sudden appearance of Baxter, Perowne’s earlier fears seem about to be realised.
Ian McEwan’s last novel, ATONEMENT, was hailed as a masterpiece all over the world. SATURDAY shares its confident, graceful prose and its remarkable perceptiveness, but is perhaps even more dramatically compelling, showing how life can change in an instant, for better or for worse. It is the work of a writer at the very height of his powers.

Review
PRAISE FOR AMSTERDAM:
‘Funnier than anything McEwan has written before, though just as lethal.’ The New York Review of Books

‘ … a compelling novel and a worthy successor to McEwan’s Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam…’ Gaby Naher, HQ