Talking About O'Dwyer - Softcover

Stead, C. K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860468365 ISBN 13: 9781860468360

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2002

Synopsis

Two Oxford dons, Newall and Winterstoke, attend their colleague's funeral. Afterward Newall reveals the secret that O'Dwyer took to the grave. During the Battle of Crete in World War II a Maori soldier died in circumstances that led to his family placing a curse on O'Dwyer. How did the soldier die? Why was O'Dwyer responsible? Gradually Newall tells all. But as he moves in space and time—from his childhood in New Zealand to Crete, from Oxford to Croatia, reflecting on wartime and peacetime, and the generations that have lived through both—it becomes clear that the story is not just O'Dwyer's, but Newall's as well.

About this title

From the Publisher:

It is late summer, late century, Oxford. Donovan O'Dwyer is dead, but for his fellow expatriate Mike Newall their shared past is still hauntingly alive.

Two Oxford dons, Newall and Winterstoke, attend their colleague's funeral. Afterward Newall reveals the secret that O'Dwyer took to the grave. During the Battle of Crete in World War II a Maori soldier died in circumstances that led to his family placing a curse on O'Dwyer. How did the soldier die? Why was O'Dwyer responsible? Gradually Newall tells all. But as he moves in space and time -- from his childhood in New Zealand to Crete, from Oxford to Croatia, reflecting on wartime and peacetime, and the generations that have lived through both -- it becomes clear that the story is not just O'Dwyer's, but Newall's as well.

C. K. Stead was Professor of English at the University of Auckland, and is well known among students of literature for The New Poetic, his study of Yeats, Eliot, and the Georgian poets. He is the author of nine novels and ten collections of poetry.

From the Inside Flap:

happened to a soldier in the infamous Maori battalion, killed in the battle for Crete during World War II? And why did the soldier’s family place a curse on O’Dwyer, the officer who was his commander at the time he died? Half a century later two Oxford dons, Newall and Winterstoke, attend the funeral of their colleague O’Dwyer, an expatriate New Zealander. After the ceremony, Newall reveals to Winterstoke the story of the curse placed on O’Dwyer during the war and, in the days that follow, he continues the tales of O’Dwyer and his ‘cursed’ life. Slowly the stories of Newall, another New Zealander in self-enforced exile, and of Winterstoke are also revealed in Stead’s complex and subtle narrative which shifts across time and space from New Zealand to Oxford to Croatia and to Crete at the time of the allied defeat there.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1860468365
• ISBN 13: 9781860468360
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224