Paint Your Wife, by Lloyd Jones #BookReview

Lloyd Jones is one of my favourite Kiwi authors, and when recently the NZ Book Council tweeted for suggestions for The Best Ten, he was one of mine.  Which reminded me that I hadn’t read Paint Your Wife, one of his books that I bought after discovering Mr Pip (2006) which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker.  I’ve also read Hand Me Down World (2010) and The Book of Fame (2000), and you can find my thoughts about them here.)

Set in the 1970s with flashbacks to the postwar years, it’s the story of a declining town and its idiosyncratic community, which gives the novel a universality in these times when country towns are declining all over the world.  New Egypt used to have a paint factory but now it doesn’t, and so the task ahead is to revitalise the town with ‘projects’ to…