Talking About O'Dwyer

by C.K. Stead

After the funeral of a colleague--O'Dwyer--a burned-out Oxford don recounts to a friend an extraordinary story about a man who made a fatal mistake leading his troops into battle during World War II. O'Dwyer, guilty and disgraced, became an academic. The narrator, meanwhile, tells his own story on the fringes of O'Dwyer's, including his romance with a Croatian woman, the death of a dear friend, and an unsatisfactory marriage.

Available editions of Talking About O'Dwyer

	9781860467103, Hardcover, Trafalgar Square, 2000 $3.97 (Used - Good) Other copies of 9781860467103

	9781860468360, Paperback, Trafalgar Square, 2002 $1.44 (Very Good) Other copies of 9781860468360

Publisher Notes

What really 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.

Media Reviews

"A quiet--perhaps too quiet--agreeably literate novel that vividly evokes time and place."

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