Hand Me Down World

A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from north Africa to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old by his father and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid’s uniform and a knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers—some generous, some exploiting—to guide her passage north.

These strangers tell of their encounters with a quiet, mysterious woman in a blue coat—each account a different view of the truth, a different truth. And slowly these fragments of a life piece together to create a spellbinding story of the courage of a mother and the versions of truth we create to accommodate our lives.

Haunting and beautiful, Hand Me Down World is simply unforgettable.

Reading Group Notes available here.

Praise for Hand Me Down World:

… a compelling narrative and an absorbing (and sometimes uncomfortable) disquisition on relative morality and justice.

Financial Times

This novel is remarkable on every level…It is a piece of narrative brilliance in its construction. And is compelling in a new, quiet and beguiling way. Jones was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his previous novel, Mister Pip, and he is sure to win fans and accolades for this one.

Sunday Tasmanian

Lloyd Jones has plotted a fine and moving story with enormous compassion, emotional depth and tender insight into humanity.

Sunday Telegraph

It would be difficult to think of another novelist quite as original or fearless as 55-year-old New Zealand author Lloyd jones. A writer of truly international sensibility … Lloyd Jones’s novel is freshly minted, unsettling and unsentimental.

The Monthly