if “Mister Pip” is preachy — and it is — it’s also a book with worthwhile thoughts to impart. Mr. Jones’s ability to translate these thoughts into the gentle, tropical, roundabout idiom of his setting (“braids remind us that sometimes it is hard to know where goodness ends and badness begins”) turns out to be genuinely affecting.

Jones covered it as a journalist, and this delicate fable never shies away from the realities of daily life shadowed by violence..... In this dazzling story-within-a-story, Jones has created a microcosm of post-colonial literature, hybridising the narratives of black and white races to create a new and resonant fable. On an island split by war, it is a story that unites....There is a fittingly dreamy, lyrical quality to Jones's writing, along with an acute ear for the earthy harmonies of village speech... Mister Pip is the first of Jones's six novels to have travelled from his native New Zealand to the UK. It is to be hoped that it won't be the last.