Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones

[Tuesday evening book club]

This review was written by Cynthia Haskell a member of the Tuesday Evening Book Club.

Published in 2010 by New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones, Hand Me Down World is the story of Ines, a North African woman, who travels from Tunisia to Berlin to find and reclaim her child. Jones cleverly uses multiple narrators, each with a different voice and style, who have met Ines at various stages of her life, to tell her story. They include the supervisor at the hotel in Tunisia where she works as a maid and a police inspector, both of whose involvement are clear when Ines is at last allowed to speak for herself. Other narrators include a sleazy Italian truck-driver, a group of alpine hunters who smuggle her over the mountains into Austria, a British film researcher, a small collector and a blind German man.

The title of the book reflects the premise that our lives and identities are handed down to us by fate and other impersonal forces, even Ines's name is not her own. While the reader may question the morality of some of Ines's actions and her analysis of her complex feelings for the father of her child, the driving force is her desperate search for her lost child and a reminder that life is not black and white. How would we feel and what would we do in her situation?