Pied Piper of Bougainville

We won’t know the Man Booker Prize longlist until 7 August, but Mister Pip had better be on it. It knocks the only New Zealand winner so far, the notorious Bone People, for six. It mightn’t win, because it falls to bits in the last 20 pages, but up to then it joins a fresh voice and gripping plot to profound and Booker-worthy themes. It has already won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Mister Pip is set on the real South Pacific island of Bougainville, which fought a separatist war against Papua New Guinea that cost 20,000 lives. The war began in 1990. We join it in 1991, when Matilda, our narrator, is 13. Bougainville is blockaded, and Matilda’s village can only wait helplessly for its fate to be decided between the redskins, the government soldiers and the rambos, the island rebels. Many people have left, including Matilda’s father (before the war, to Australia) and all her teachers.