Talking About O'Dwyer

Nov 30, 2025 5:48 AM

Author:C. K. Stead

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.

Reviews

There is a great feeling of opulence, decay, love and death about it

—— Rick Stein

Every once in a while, like certain golden moments of happiness, infinitely memorable, one stumbles on a book or a writer, and the impact is like an indelible mark. Lampedusa's The Leopard, his only novel, and a masterpiece, is such a work

—— Independent

Perhaps the greatest novel of the century

—— L.P. Hartley

One of the great lonely books...not a historical novel, but a novel which happens to take place in history

—— E.M. Forster

The poetry of Lampedusa's novel flows into the Sicilian countryside...a work of great artistry

—— Peter Ackroyd

I was astounded by the power of the writing

—— Corin Redgrave

A great book

—— Observer

Few novels in the last ten years have given me so much enjoyment

—— Sunday Times

A novel of exceptional stature. One may claim for it classic status

—— Frank Kermode

A literary phenomenon on the grandest scale – a work of genius

—— Isabel Quigly

Sublime and sweet melancholy suffuses the story. Beautiful

—— Tim Waterstone , The Week

A delicate meditation on mortality, decay and the fading of beauty

—— Martin Sixsmith , The Week

Historical fiction at its best

—— Orlando Figes , The Week

No novel is perfect, but this small, wonderfully atmospheric and immensely poignant story...comes very close

—— Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2021*

Blisteringly angry..,begins as a black comedy but gradually turns much darker with the mad-as-hell narrator suspected of murdering his lovers in London

—— Sunday Telegraph

Sutton shows us everything through Freeman's eyes and he pulls it off very well indeed. A horrible character but a compelling narrator

—— William Leith , Evening Standard

Sutton shows us everything through Freeman's eyes and he pulls it off very well indeed

—— William Leith , The Scotsman

This darkly comic novel with it's brilliantly acute observations of life in London in the 21st Century completely captures the zeitgeist and raises more than a few laughs.

—— Carla McKay , Daily Mail

Gripping and darkly comic tale of 21st-century material greed

—— Shortlist

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