Talking About O'Dwyer - Softcover

Two novels by a critically acclaimed New Zealand writer - All Visitors Ashore is set in 1951 and in Auckland the young Curt Skidmore's head is full of novels waiting to be unravelled and his trousers full of something much more irrepressible. Talking About O'Dwyer is set in Oxford and Oxford don Mike Newall after attending a colleague's funeral he reveals a secret that the family of a Maori soldier killed during World War Two placed a curse on O'Dwyer - and the story is not just O'Dwyer's but Newall's as well.

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.