Most Popular Books by Lloyd Jones

From a New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning illustrator comes an utterly hilarious step-by-step guide to writing a book, as told by a child "author." Want to write a book? Well, the spunky, know-it-all narrator of this side-splitting story can tell you just how to do it. She walks readers through the whole process, from deciding what to write about (like dump trucks or The Olden Days) to writing a story that doesn''t put everyone to sleep and getting people to buy your book (tips: be nice, give them cookies, and if all else fails, tie them to a chair). Packed with bestselling author Lloyd-Jones''s signature wit and charm, this picture book, with whimsical illustrations by beloved illustrator Layton, delivers an outrageously silly story that is sure to have young readers--and writers!--howling with laughter.

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s island, only one white person stays behind. Mr. Watts, whom the kids call Pop Eye, wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley, and he steps in to teach the children when there is no one else. His only lessons consist of reading from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr. Dickens. For Matilda, Dickens’s hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Watts’s book begins to inflame the children’s imaginations with dreams about Dickens’s London and the larger world. But how will they answer when the soldiers demand to know: where is this man named Pip? Set against the stunning beauty of Bougainville in the South Pacific during the civil war in the early 1990s, Lloyd Jones’s breathtaking novel shows what magic a child’s imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.

Richard Lloyd Jones (1799-1885)was born in Wales. He married Mary. They emigrated and settled in Wisconsin.

"Outward things are easily discussed; those things which touch the surface of our life we may debate and at times laugh and joke about in public. Of our hopes and fears, our disappointments and discouragements we may hint in the sweet confidences of love. Still below these there is an unsurveyed region of reality, a world of yearnings and gropings, strengths and weaknesses that reveal their existence, if at all, not in words and phrases, but in glimmerings of joy or sorrow that mantle the face, in the tenderer tones, the firmer step, the kindlier smile, in unwonted flashes of eye-light. Prayer and Worship are words that point to these deeper strata of being." --From the introduction

From the author of the beloved, bestselling Mister Pip: a novel about a mother''s search for her stolen child. A novel you can''t stop thinking about. A woman washes up on a beach in Sicily. She has come from Tunisia to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid''s uniform and a homemade knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers — some generous, some malevolent — to guide her passage north. These strangers tell of their encounters with her, building her story in fragments of memory, prejudice and sentiment into a moving work of sacrifice and love. Hand Me Down World tells an epic story about the courage of a mother, the versions of truth to which we accommodate our lives, and love''s ultimate power to redeem us.

Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived an elf. The elf was a shoemaker, and her shoes were admired around the kingdom. The elf was confident at her job, until one day the Princess ordered a pair of shoes for the Royal Ball. Putting pressure on herself and comparing her work to her friends'' on ''Elfstagram'', the elf is worried that her shoes will not be perfect. The Elf, The Princess and the Impossible Shoe explores childhood perfectionism and the anxiety that it can cause, and offers children aged 5+ effective tools to deal with their feelings. It also contains a guide for parents and professionals, giving expert advice on how to use the book to aid discussion on this topic.

Lloyd Jones was seven years old the first time he climbed high into a grandstand to watch rugby with his father. The experience was baptismal. From his new elevated perspective Jones believed he could see everything that mattered – a field of play that rolled out, green with promise, from suburban New Zealand to the wider world. The grandstand is a guiding metaphor for these questing narrative poems that reach back into childhood and forward into the life of a writer constantly experimenting with form and voice. Jones writes of the wild secrets of boyhood – riding dogs, falling from trees, destroying the class ukuleles, learning to sail in small boats. He is alert to the airless small-town grievances that must inevitably be escaped. As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely, testing his identity against difference – places, people, politics and importantly, language. The more recent poems are a re-assembling of coordinates and a return to the local view. The grandstand has long been decommissioned – it''s a housing estate now, but the poems are full of air and greenery. Dream spaces where language is forever in play.

In tango, there are no wrong turns. But every dance begins with a backward step. Taking his cue from the tango, the acclaimed author of Mister Pip has written a thrilling and sensuous novel about how we fall in love. Ranging from rural New Zealand during the final days of World War I to Buenos Aires at mid-century to the present day, this masterful novel intertwines two love stories across three generations. The deep suspicions of an isolated community in the midst of war force Louise and Schmidt—two near-strangers—to hide in a cave overlooking the ocean. Desperate for solace, Schmidt teaches Louise the tango, and the iconic dance becomes their mutual obsession and the trigger for an affair that will span continents. Years later, Schmidt’s granddaughter, keeper of the family secrets, owns a restaurant in Wellington where a shy young student named Lionel washes the dishes. One day she snaps her fingers in his direction and says: “I need to dance.” Brilliantly evoking the seductive power of one of the world’s most famous dances, Lloyd Jones’s novel is a virtuoso performance.