Hand Me Down World

Lloyd Jones

Jan 2011 · Bolinda · Narrated by Humphrey Bower

About this audiobook

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 – some generous, some exploiting – 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, a different 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.

About the author

Award-winning novelist 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, the setting for his bestselling Mister Pip. Jones has received awards including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial fellowship in 1988, the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize (2003) and the Montana New Zealand Book Award (2001) for The Book of Fame. In 2007 Jones won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Mister Pip, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Humphrey Bower is a gifted and versatile actor. Since obtaining a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature at Oxford University, he has worked extensively in theatre, television and audiobook narration. Humphrey won the prestigious Audie Award (US) for his performance of The Family Frying Pan by Bryce Courtenay, and was shortlisted for an Audie Award for his performances of Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan and Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay. Humphrey's sensitive and intelligent readings are highly regarded and he is well-known for his capacity to perform a variety of accents.