A beautiful library inspired by a New Zealand novel now stands complete in the middle of a conflict ravaged and warlord controlled town in the Pacific’s Melanesia, but it has only a solitary book after 5000 others fell into a corruption quagmire.
Novelist Lloyd Jones, author of the 2006 novel Mister Pip that inspired the building, finds it all hard to fathom, blaming “either incompetence or indifference, which for all I know may be a local form of political interference. I don’t just know [what happened to the books]”.