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 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. 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.
Lloyd Jones was born in 1955 in Lower Hutt in New Zealand and graduated from Victoria University. He has worked as a journalist and covered Papua New Guinea's blockade of Bougainville during the 1990s, which formed the setting for his bestselling Mister Pip. Jones has received awards including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial fellowship (1988), the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize (2003) and the Montana New Zealand Book Award (2001). In 2007, Jones won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Mister Pip, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2008 he received the New Zealand Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. His latest book is Hand Me Down World.
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'There are no easy answers in this thoughtful novel. Indeed, much of its intrigue and enjoyment comes from piecing together the story from the myriad voices. Humane and moving, it's a worthy successor to Jones's last novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mister Pip.' Daily Mail
