Having left the university to write full-time at the end of volume two, Stead throws himself into his work. In novels like Sister Hollywood and My Name Was Judas, criticism in the London Review of Books and the Financial Times, poetry and memoir, Stead establishes his international reputation as novelist, poet, and critic. It is also a period when Stead's fearless lucidity on matters literary and political embroil him in argument—from The Bone Peopl...

Max Jackson, a New Zealander living and lecturing in Paris, has a complicated arrangement with his estranged French wife, Louise. In love with his younger Sorbonne colleague Sylvie, he finds himself entangled with Helen, a troubled young English student.When a Cezanne painting goes missing from Louise's apartment, the boundaries he has struggled to maintain threaten to collapse.Infused with literary musings and the spirit of Paris, The Necessary Angel is as much an...

A striking new collection of accessible yet elegant stories from literary giant and master craftsman C.K. Stead.Gathered from throughout Stead's career, these stories are a reminder of his deft storytelling and literary power. They are clever, sensual, wry and beautifully written, with Stead's subtle sense of humour evident at every turn.The collection can be read as a meditation on the writerly life, and includes a number of new, previously unpublished stories, including '...

Recently divorced New Zealander Sam Nola returns to London, where he spent two years in his early twenties. It is early 2003, and on both sides of Atlantic the case for military intervention in Iraq is being made - or fabricated.But life for Sam has never been better: a grown-up, half-French daughter from a long ago affair has recently got in touch, and he has walked into a lucrative role in the booming banking sector.It is only when he learns of the deaths of two friends w...

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 ...

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 ...

Award-winning author C.K. Stead takes us to the heart of contemporary Paris and into a world of books and witty conversation. The Necessary Angel is a story of people grappling with love and fidelity; a story about the importance of books; a commentary on living in complex modern-day Europe; and a page-turning mystery. With a surprising twist at the end, this is a sophisticated novel that shows Stead writing at the height of his powers.'Stead is a fine writer, intelligent ...

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 o...

"Will appeal to lovers of the wayward novel game as it is played by Lawrence Sterne or Italo Calvino" - Jackie Wullschläger, Financial TimesProfessor 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 kitche...

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 ...

'A vivid and engrossing historical novel' Daily TelegraphSpanning 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 Fr...

Max Jackson, a New Zealander living and lecturing in Paris, has a complicated arrangement with his estranged French wife, Louise. In love with his younger Sorbonne colleague Sylvie, he finds himself entangled with Helen, a troubled young English student. When a Cezanne painting goes missing from Louise's apartment, the boundaries he has struggled to maintain threaten to collapse.