‘Characters migrate.’ New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip takes this aphorism from Umberto Eco as its epigraph and it has multiple resonances in his novel. The thirteen-year-old narrator Matilda’s father has migrated to Australia; the most influential male influence on her young life, Mr Watts, the last white man for miles around, has settled on her Pacific island of Bougainville. 

At a time of political crisis, the mysterious Mr Watts becomes a stand-in schoolmaster for Matilda and other young islanders, bringing a sense of order into their lives by reading them daily instalments of Great Expectations. As he does so, he creates an imaginative universe that allows them to