Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gilmore’s Dairy Jones | 1986 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 2 | Splinter | 1988 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 3 | Choo Woo | 1999 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 4 | The Book of Fame | 2000 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 5 | Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance | 2001 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 6 | Paint Your Wife | 2004 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 7 | Hand Me Down World | 2010 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 8 | The Cage | 2018 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 9 | Mister Pip | 2020 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
| 10 | The Fish | 2022 | Lloyd Jones | Buy |
Lloyd Jones published his first novel, Gilmore’s Dairy Jones, in 1986, and has been producing literary fiction at a steady pace ever since. His early novels are grounded in New Zealand settings and characters, but his work gradually expanded in scope and ambition. The Book of Fame (2000), a reimagining of the 1905 All Blacks tour of Britain, marked a shift toward bolder historical and mythological territory.
The novel that drew the widest international attention was Mister Pip (published from 2006-2007), a story of books and survival set on an island during civil war. It won multiple awards and brought Jones readers far beyond New Zealand. In the years that followed, he continued writing novels that resist easy categorisation, including Hand Me Down World (2010), which tells its story through a series of voices describing the same woman, and The Cage (2018), a short, intense novel about identity and captivity.
Jones’s more recent works include The Fish (2022), and a reissue of Mister Pip in 2020. Across these ten standalone novels, he returns repeatedly to questions about who we are, how we construct ourselves through stories, and what survives when ordinary life is disrupted.