A Novel

Mansfield

'A vivid and engrossing historical novel' Daily Telegraph

Mansfield's world is marvellously evoked -C. K. Stead has researched his subject with the sureness of a scholar but has written with the imaginative confidence of a first-class novelist. He has an uncanny ability to express the thoughts, and the voice of his young heroine. Mansfield is a splendid achievement.

This is a different kind of writing, a writing that tinkers with the trivia of human lives. And ironically, this is where this book succeeds like a miracle, for trivia, passion, the fear of death are the arterial blood of fiction.

Fascinating-accomplishes with so much erudition, intelligence and psychological acumen

A fine achievement, rich in sobriety and purpose, in warmth and dazzling light.

One of [Mansfield's] great strengths as a writer is the interplay between the senses and the intellect and Stead's own prose captures this

C.K.Stead has served us the most delicious, exquisitely prepared, delicately spiced Katherine Mansfield one could ever wish for, and the gourmet in me is immensely grateful...   After finishing Mansfield I went back through its 246 pages trying to see 'how it is done' and, I must confess, I have no idea.   A dearth of adjectives, an extraordinary accuracy of description merely through the use of verbs and nouns, the right intuition of when to comment and when to leave good enough alone, a taste for the right anecdote and a certain Mansfieldean humour that permeates the entire story from choice beginning to measured end: all these things no doubt contribute to build the moving truthful core of this novel, but they hardly explain its perfect workings.

This is a highly intelligent and scrupulous work. As an evocation of the period it bears comparison with Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy...   Maugham said of Mansfield's stories that 'not the least of her gifts was that which enabled her to give you the heartbreak that lay behind what was to all appearances a casual conversation over a cup of tea; and, heaven knows, that is not an easy thing to do.'   Stead has that gift himself, and adds to it an unusual understanding of his characters.   You feel Mansfield was just like that; and yet she is also Stead's Mansfield.

Stead leaves Katherine Mansfield still alive, still writing and hoping, at the conclusion of this excellent novel.   He believes as should we all, that what is important is the life and work of our great writers, and not the manner of their death.   His own latest work is a fine achievement, rich in sobriety and purpose, in warmth and dazzling light.

C. K. Stead was Professor of English at the University of Auckland until 1986. In 1984, he was awarded the CBE for services to New Zealand literature. He has published ten volumes of poetry, two volumes of stories and several works of criticism, and edited the Penguin Modern Classics Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield (1977). Mansfield is his tenth novel.

'A vivid and engrossing historical novel' Daily Telegraph 
 
Spanning three years in the life of the writer Katherine Mansfield during the First World War, Mansfield follows the ups and downs of her relationship with Jack Middleton Murry and her struggle to write the 'new kind of fiction' which she felt the times demanded. She is restless, constantly on the move, in and out of London, to and from France, even into the war zone, to be with her French lover, novelist Francis Carco. 
 
For a short time, Mansfield is able to behave as though the war is merely 'background', but her ardent relationship with her brother, who arrives from New Zealand to fight in France, makes detachment impossible - as does her love for Jack's Oxford friend Frederick Goodyear, also a soldier. The war's shadow remorselessly darkens all their lives, but only increases Mansfield's determination to break through as a writer. 
 
Mansfield is a sharp, subtle and appealing portrait of the person of whose work Virginia Woolf wrote: "It was the only writing I was ever jealous of."

Talking About O'Dwyer

In his new bachelor flat, too close to comfort to his former family home, Mike Newall, Oxford don and Wittgenstein scholar seeks to rebuild his life, but feels increasingly weighed down by the past. 
 
When Donovan O'Dwyer, his colleague and fellow expatriate New Zealander dies, Newall attends the funeral. Afterwards, Newall reveals to his old friend Bertie Winterstoke the secret that O'Dwyer carried with him to his grave. During the battle for Crete in the Second World War, a soldier in New Zealand's Maori battalion died in harrowing circumstances. Believing his commanding officer, O'Dwyer, was responsible for the death, the soldier's family placed a makutu, a Maori curse, on him. 
 
Winterstoke demands to be told all, and in the days that follow Newall obliges. But Newall's life and O'Dwyer's are curiously interconnected and Newall finds that he must interweave O'Dwyer's tale with his own - his childhood in New Zealand, his self imposed exile in Oxford, his marriage and divorce, the pilgrimage recently made to Croatia and the promise of a new beginning that this may hold. Gradually, through a series of entwined stories, beautifully told, reflecting on decades of war and of peace, on memory and its failures, and on language and its limitations, Mike Newall comes to see a way of laying the ghosts of O'Dwyer's - and his own - past to rest.

The Secret History Of Modernism

'C. K. Stead is challenging, fun, urbane and brilliant. Read him' - Spectator

Stead's writing is meticulous and elegant... The Secret History of Modernism is packed with interesting ideas and insights

The Secret History of Modernism is as subtle as Jane Austen and as fatalistic as Thomas Hardy. There is a profound sense of understanding and many truths... Readers must reach for this book with both hands

If this is not the best novel I've read this year, it has banished the memory of anything that came close... It reads like a dream

C.K. Stead was Professor of English at the University of Aukland until 1986. In 1984 he was awarded the CBE for services to New Zealand literature. He has published eleven volumes of poetry, two volumes of stories, several works of criticism, a memoir and twelve novels including, most recently, Risk.

A chance meeting has New Zealand writer Laszlo Winter thinking back to his time in London in the late 1950s. The Empire might be in a state of collapse, but for young 'colonials', England remains a mythical place that draws them from the farthest corners of the globe. 
 
There was Australian Samantha Conlan, clever, desirable, hopelessly in love with married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein, who carried with him a dark history. Rajiv, an earnest young Indian at work on a study of Yeats and the Indian mind. The enigmatic Margot, whose bond with her athletic brother Mark troubled Laszlo in ways he didn't quite understand. Heather, the call girl with whom Laszlo exchanged lessons on Shakespeare for lessons in love. 
 
The great writers of the time, and the details of their lives are recorded by Samantha in her idiosyncratic research project that she named her Secret History of Modernism. There was all of that and more, and then there was Laszlo, knocking blindly about among them, despairing at his academic prospects, and gradually realising that he was, would only ever be, a storyteller. Now, years later, from the other side of the world, the people seem to spring to life again, in this beguiling work by one of New Zealand's foremost writers.

My Name Was Judas

Some forty years after Jesus' death, Judas tries to set the record straight, and refutes his reputation as the betrayer.

C. K. Stead is challenging, fun, urbane and brilliant. Read him

Stead's book delights in subtle comedy and takes care to puncture all kinds of minor myths...Written with glowing simplicity and rich in delicate humour...[A] thought-provoking, witty and highly topical novel

[An] elegant, calm novel...Stead writes a cool, reasonable prose......Stead maintains an eye unblinkingly opposed to the transcendental

A subtly potent revisionist account of the life and death of Jesus

CK Stead, New Zealand's most distinguished man of letters - scholar, critic and poet, as well as novelist - has written a fiction that is remarkable, intelligent and moving

Brilliantly imagined...Among Stead's many achievements is a convincing social, political and physical backdrop...his creation of a coherent, rival story - clever, moving and sometimes witty, with fully human characters - is nothing short of a revelation

A pleasingly unpredictable mix of traditional and radical... It's clever, thought-provoking

C.K. Stead was Professor of English at the University of Aukland until 1986. In 1984 he was awarded the CBE for services to New Zealand literature. He has published eleven volumes of poetry, two volumes of stories, several works of criticism, a memoir and twelve novels including, most recently, Risk.

We all know the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but what about the version according to Judas? 
 
In this witty, original and teasingly controversial account, some forty years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally tells the story as he remembers it. Looking back on his childhood and youth from an old age the gospel writers denied him, Judas recalls his friendship with Jesus; their schooling together; their families; the people who would go on to be disciples and followers; their journeys together and their dealings with the powers of Rome and the Temple. 
 
His is a story of friendship and rivalry, of a time of uncertainty and enquiry, a testing of belief, endurance and loyalty.

All Visitors Ashore

It seems incontestable to me that C.K. Stead is among the very best contemporary novelists.

C. K Stead was Professor of English at the University of Auckland until 1986. He is known to students of literature as the author of The New Poetic, a study of Yeats, Eliot and the Georgian poets. He is the only New Zealand writer to have won the New Zealand Book Award for both poetry and fiction, which latter he has won twice for All Vistiors Ashore and The Singing Whakapapa. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1984 he was awarded the C.B.E. for services to New Zealand Literature.

As their freinds leave for Europe and the government gets tough with the unions, a bohemian community is enjoying the euphoria of youth. 
 
It was their dreamtime. The wider world beckoned from the white ships sailing past Rangitoto Island, but the dream was also here on the Takapuna shoreline of Auckland, where the artist Melior Farbro grew his vegetables and let Cecilia Skyways follow her own form of Zen Buddhism in his garden hut. Where Curl Skidmore, his brilliant young head full of novels waiting to be unravelled, could dream of God, Fame, Nirvana, Great Love, or maybe just sex. Where not even the harbourfront strike of 1951 could convince them that life wasn't about poetry and painting and potential.

C. K. Stead

"Will appeal to lovers of the wayward novel game as it is played by Lawrence Sterne or Italo Calvino" - Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times 
 
Professor Harry Butler is obsessed with the Mind/Body problem. Unfortunately, this is not the least of his problems. Harry's wife has turned his study into a sufi shrine where she sits cross-legged and chants for hours on end: "I am not this body..." And Harry doesn't know it yet but the Drug Squad have taken up residence in his kitchen so as to observe the movements of his neighbours and their visitors. Among these visitors, photographed by the drug squad, is one of his oldest friends. And living next door is a woman Harry may have had an encounter with in Singapore. 
 
The University is no escape from these complications on the domestic front: Harry's relationship with a student is causing concern among the Philosophy Department Women's Collective. Some of his colleagues also suspect him of going astray academically. 
 
The story takes place in Auckland, New Zealand. But who is telling the story? Why is he in Europe? Why does he keep moving from one city to another, and why does he seem to require the presence of a certain Uta Haverstrom in order to write it? 
 
The Death of the Body is a delightful blend of wit, intelligence and excitement.

C. K. Stead

Books by C. K. Stead

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