I had some days off…and that’s when I always read a good book – or try to find a good book to read. This October week I was lucky, because I brought Lloyd Jones’s Hand Me Down World.

A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from north Africa to find her son, stolen from her by his father when the boy was just days old and taken to Berlin. With nothing but her maid’s uniform and a knife in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers— some generous, some exploiting—to guide her passage north.
These strangers all tell their story about her, and each account gives a different view of the truth, just like the versions of truth we all create to accomodate our lives. These fragments of a life piece together to create a spellbinding story of her, this woman and mother, who crosses continents searching for her missing child. Not until towards the end, we also get her own version of the story.
It’s haunting and beautiful, because ”Sometimes a person passes through your world and you don’t forget them.” She is one of them, and this is her story. I suggest you read it.