On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with almost everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations. While artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures...

Mr. Watts is the last Englishman remaining in a tropical village in Bougainville during its brutal civil war in the 1990s. He begins to teach the local children by reading them Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Matilda, an imaginative young girl, is transported into the story of the novel, believing that Dickens' character Pip is her friend. Matilda's "Pip" world is an extraordinary fusion of Dickens' Victorian London with the environment and...