Bite It above the Eyes

Susan Eilenberg

• BuyMister Pip by Lloyd Jones
  Murray, 223 pp, £12.99, June 2007, ISBN 978 0 7195 6456 7

As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them . . . my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

A book about the delights and healing effects of reading, recalling the novels about precocious readers and intellectual explorers that many of us grew up with, South Pacific cousin to Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and innumerable similar childhood favourites: this is the last place one would expect to encounter a jealous quarrel about the nature of referentiality.