Lloyd Jones 
Mister Pip 

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matildas island, only one white person stays behind. Mr. Watts, whom the kids call Pop Eye, wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley, and he steps in to teach the children when there is no one else. His only lessons consist of reading from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr. Dickens.For Matilda, Dickenss hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Wattss book begins to inflame the childrens imaginations with dreams about Dickenss London and the larger world. But how will they answer when the soldiers demand to know: where is this man named Pip?Set against the stunning beauty of Bougainville in the South Pacific during the civil war in the early 1990s, Lloyd Joness breathtaking novel shows what magic a childs imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.From the Hardcover edition.