Mr. Watts is the last Englishman remaining in a tropical village in Bougainville during its civil war in the 1990s. He begins to teach the local children by reading them Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Matilda, an imaginative young girl, is transported into the story of the novel, believing that Dickens' character Pip is her friend. Matilda's "Pip" world is an extraordinary fusion of Dickens' Victorian London with the environment and people she knows on the island.