We have nominations from Asia, Africa and South America so far, so I looked to the South Pacific for my final nomination. This is actually a challenging (though enjoyable) process - it took me awhile to even settle on my first nomination because I'd keep finding something that sounded good but was not exactly set in the same country as the author, such as a play I looked at from a Swiss author with the location's setting a town "somewhere in Central Europe" (The Visit) or a Chilean/international vagabond author with a book that starts in Mexico and travels the world (The Savage Detectives).
Such is the case with this nomination, but I'm offering it anyway, mainly because we haven't covered the country the author is from nor the country the book's set in and they're both in the South Pacific. I almost decided to go with
Stonedogs which is from and set in the same country (New Zealand), but it seems like a somewhat ultraviolent book for this club (the author has been compared to film director Quentin Tarantino); still "showing the underbelly of New Zealand and Maori society with drugs, gangs and violence in the northern tourist city of Rotorua (aka Roto-Vegas)" seemed like it could be eye-opening concerning New Zealand culture.
My nomination though is
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. The author is from New Zealand and the book is set on Bougainville, an autonomous island off Papua New Guinea. The book won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and the Kiriyama Prize, and it was a Man Booker finalist.
From Goodreads:
In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
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