Susan Eilenberg writes:

As in Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002), Jones proves sly, engaging, worth reading and even rereading; his small-scale effects are something other than the automatic inscriptions of high concept. Mister Pip is not his best work. Still, unlike, say, the anthropologically minded novelist Peter Dickinson, who works with sometimes similarly chronologically doubled structures in books at least nominally intended for children, and who allows what’s strange to emerge from an angle of such emotional intimacy that we miss the sign at which we might otherwise have wondered, Jones seems to prefer his exotic material to be marked ‘exotic’ and to allow the discomfort of his readers’ expectations of the category to substitute for the work of passionate transformation that is the novel’s real task. Although what happens to Mister Pip’s characters appals, the novel progresses as if on a motorway, signposts to meaning well marked at frequent intervals in letters a foot high.

(LRB 4 October 2007)

Available in a paperback edition

John Murray | hardback 223 pp. |ISBN: 9780719564567